Member-only story
Moments Too Quick to Capture in Photographs
Prose Poetry
Blink. I couldn’t take a photo of that moment you smiled, the sun revealing your true face to all onlookers, while I marveled that I knew someone like you in the first place. Ice cream lips and firework eyes — summer became you like a beautiful dress on an hourglass figure.
Blink. Somewhere there’s a snapshot of you with your eyes closed, a laugh spreading your mouth wide as if you’re just a moment from tasting the sky. The air around you was electric, pulsing, but you had no care or time for all those things that didn’t concern you. The passenger seat is arched back as your laughter coats the air, but none of this will translate anywhere except in the cabinets of my memory.
Blink. This time, you’re a vision in nothing but bedsheets tangled around your limbs. No one would ever know about that night, but I was the one with the Polaroid camera that wouldn’t last past the winter. You hid your face as if you were embarrassed; it was all an act, of course, for all the invisible onlookers who might have judged you for spending the night in a man’s apartment. But your blush was all for me and all the things we’d do when I set the camera back down.
Blink. It’s the last time I caught you in my lens. Your eyes are closed — almost as if that image is a fixture, a trope, a familiar…
