Looking at Photographs in Which Our Faces Do Not Appear
- Looking at Photographs in Which Our Faces Do Not Appear
The girl removes her clothes and punishes them in the road. She wipes her skin with her hands and runs toward the man with the camera: her head a bobbing black poppy, rubbery stem, the flesh of her arms deliquescing. If her skin were the throat of a rose, what insects would wrestle there? Light stuffs a flower of pain in her mouth. The man burns her nakedness into rag paper, light repeating like a pollen flown over the skin. Too hot. When he delivers her to the hospital, the doctors stitch her arm into a hundred glossy mouths to say it. Meanwhile, I dance in the throat wielding a simple barb. I dance the honey and you dance the way home, and either of us may walk further in or away. Look: her clothes lie heavy in the road like a pair of crushed animals. Her skin blooms in the thick book on the shelf. Her skin is a jaw of paper and you will chew it at its careful hinge. You will lay your hands and many eyes upon her. You will lay your hands and many eyes upon her. [End Page 17]
Susan B. A. Somers-Willett is the author of two award-winning books of poetry, Quiver (University of Georgia Press, 2009) and Roam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2006) and a book of criticism, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2009). Her writing has been featured by several journals, including Iowa Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, and the New Yorker's Book Bench. Her collaborative documentary poetry series "Women of Troy" aired on PRI and BBC radio affiliates and received a 2010 Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media.
