WHEN I WAS 17 I BORROWED MY FATHER’S CAMERA

My mother’s garage is where I left my photographs. When I visit she complains that her car must hold its breath to squeeze past the stacks on which we once rested our pride like bored elbows on the smooth black surface of a chemistry lab table. Black and white photos white borders no frames singular shots of purpose; one even yielded a prize a trophy for an underachieving artist who prayed on conception. Flattened, shuttled between a portfolio. Italian wallet. Black hardened cardboard straight and taut clenching the yellowed black and yellowed white prints made in darkness while my boyfriend kissed my neck. The shadowed figure, slow speed f-stop low, tight lipped saying nothing. He runs up the stairs of the high school, a penlight of brightness seeps into a window at the apex of the stairs. I caught the motion slowed into haze and shape. Squint and the boy’s hat is there. The light pressed onto the cold hard banister permanently a marker that it was day and he was night.

I tried again a dozen times, setting and re-shuttering, posing and burning the imagined outcomes. Failed and amateur studies of a green artichoke spilling off a chrome platter, tickled by peppercorns of black and white, a play on color, no color. Green without color is grey and the leaves look like rotted bark. Or the slinky girl half-dressed slung across velvet red, I backlighted her frizz and begged out her sultriness. Puckered lips and half-lowered violet lids; a portrait of a lady appears blandly. Or the side of the government building, tilted wrong even for an artist’s eye or the smashed window, its center exploded; ripples of glass worms, an insect’s feelers strung out in a perfectly damaged circle or the fountains in front of Caesars Palace at night, slow and blurred and terribly terribly dull or the desert a long idle landscape stretched to the edges glittering with a light here and there, sequins on a blanket in a dark room. I was kidding my chemicals and so I quit this deceitful grasping at images caught like fresh fish not yet in the boat. I was lucky then. My eye closed over the Yashica tight on a tripod I trusted it to dig past mere particles and slap the cheek at 1/60th of a second. A mark was left behind a handprint embossed on paper with my fingerprints.