Fiction? | Non Fiction?




Southern

You weren’t born into the frozen February air up here,
I know.
Shot through a camera lens relaxed and delicate
like the slow draw compliments of the people
that came to see the new baby.


(But you came north strapped in a car seat soon after
and you like to think you protested the whole thing.)


These pictures piled in a shoe box show fleeting moments
I can’t ever forget but really don’t remember;
hazy with the touch of a distant day and Carolina shine —
— looking like relics from a point
in the earth’s history where everything was bronzed
with innocence.


The swelling sighs of nostalgia exhaled on a
Labor Day afternoon.
My imprint left on the bed
that a sister has abandoned for college.


Outside the sky drains the last
of today’s light.
I take the curves back to Philadelphia,
fast and slow.