Daniel Barnum
—
To Love Somebody
(after Terrance Hayes & with lines by the Bee Gees)
maybe because of love, or more likely because
her beauty was so certain, upon first seeing
the rust tone picture in a magazine I still keep
at home, in which she sits at the wheel, clay
vessels she’d convinced
into existence by the skin
of her cracked hands stacked in rows as neat as honey
comb behind her, dad drove the week’s
distance it took to find whatever desert mom was
hiding in. that’s how I begin. that story
only gets creepier
every time I tell
it. what happened after them? there’s a name
for when you can remember
a scene only when you see yourself depicted
in its moment. I mean: seeing the photo-
graph of you
wearing a jack-o-lantern
costume on your third halloween, set on top
of the real thing – one as big as your parents –
and think wait, do I know that pumpkin
from somewhere? or something
I’m too tired to look
up right now. pulled an all-nighter
again with my ancestors’ albums. books
I took from my dad and uncle’s upcountry
cabins years ago – said I’d return
but didn’t. envelopes-worth from family in the south-
west, sent in the early after-
math of my mom’s murder.
daniel, when will you get past that? I never wrote
back. in candids of my parents
on either side of when they met, far as the record
shows, there’s a certain kind of light
that never shone on me.
I want my life
to be lived without this constant
worry now about what’s happening the next
room over, who’s dying while I’m watching
old episodes of bad TV. the show where two brothers
crawl the country
in their black impala
looking for gods and monsters always
makes me think about my father and his best
friend on their trip to Arizona to break my mom
out from her corner of burnt earth. in this one picture
I can see her
waiting for what she doesn’t
know will hurt her. sprawls her leg far
out on the ground around a fire pit
built down in the canyons behind her mother’s desert
ranch. her brother’s body is cut off
at the waist by the print’s
dimensions. her face
lit by the blaze contained in the photo’s
bottom quadrant. everything is soft
as evening with the hazy effect of early '80s
film stock seaming her hair into the dark.
she is holding another
camera, unaware
of any capture. it’s difficult
not to think of her as a martyr saint. I thought
I said stop that. shut up – you don’t know
what it’s like when it comes back in my brain,
I see her face again as I never saw
past childhood: light
stuck in its rush
to delimit the image under her gaze –
what sinks into an uncertain
somewhere below the frame.
Daniel Barnum lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio, where they serve as the associate managing editor of The Journal. Their poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming from Pleiades, Hayden's Ferry Review, West Branch, The Offing, Muzzle and elsewhere. Their first chapbook, Names for Animals, is out now from Seven Kitchens Press.
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