Album

My family never owned

a movie camera

Our history lives only

in a scrapbook

where we are still

and mainly black and white

The primitive color shots

have paled,

leaving only ghosts of

the grandfather

awkwardly holding the baby,

the one-year-old grinning 

over a birthday cake

Early Polaroids are even eerier,

faded nearly blank with slivers of brown 

where images used to be 

In my mind I see 

the toddler petting a dog

on a page that contains nothing but 

glossy cards with crinkly edges

And so we are preserved 

in grayscale tableau

Figures at a table

or in front of a Christmas tree,

couples and groups 

with faces frozen into smiles, 

a boy with a bike,

a girl with a doll,

a man in a hat,

a lady in a dress,

colorless people from a 

monochrome past

with only an occasional blur

to hint that we were ever alive

Originally published in "Anthology One" from The Alsop Review Press