Photograph Sonnet
Nov 13th, 2007 by Whitney
Miss Coca-Cola 1943
For my grandmother, Isabel Blackwell Roberts,
1925-1977
“Passion moves inward,
striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.”
- Susan Sontag, Disease and It’s Metaphors
Her own figure stitched in by a woolknit,
striped bathing-suit, her fingers enclose
the waist of a coke bottle, dark and fit
as a tiny dressmakers’ dummy, poised
for another stretch of fabric. I hold
you now, framed: shorn dark curls, long legs, parted,
painted lips, sunlit collar bones: the mold
that cast my father, then separated.
I wonder if you blamed “the dishwater”
when he noticed your papery skin, hands
painted with bruises, and the matter
of collecting black curls from the wash-stand:
like thin threads, shredding, five years of holding
the poison’s name, the cancer unfolding.
[...] Original post by Whitney [...]