Some 19th Century Photographs
by William Robert Flowers

An aunt's face, flattened and strained like a penny
on a humming steel rail, floats in the air
above her family's posed portrait.

In another family, the hand of an infant
rests on the woolen sleeve of the brother
that drowned him accidentally a decade before.

The unconscious living, the diffused dead.
Their fragmentary resonances somehow caught in the simpler
mechanics of the early cameras—the slipstream

flash, the passage through the living world
to the center their bodies can no longer hold.

William Robert Flowers was born in rural western Tennessee. He holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and is currently attending the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he is enrolled in the MFA program with a concentration on poetry. He has had work published in Poetry Miscellany, Hunger Mountain, and Great River Review. He lives in Wilmington with his wife, Megan.

© 2008 prickofthespindle.com