Assembled and Edited by Ryan P. Kinney
From works by JM Romig and Lennart Lundh
The photographs
They lie
in a folder in a drawer
in a second-hand store.
They are a collage of poorly taken polaroids
All assembled before the Manor Woods formal,
Disheveled,
but for her hand on his arm
and her sister's slight separation
from man and wife.
She is the stranger in the waiting room
with fingers knotted in prayer
or tedium -
held together by masking tape and pushpins
on a well-loved corkboard
The husband
He is a fragile scarecrow
filled with crumpled up first drafts
of love notes
kicked through cobwebs that linger
in the long forgotten corners
of old classrooms.
He abuses his wife in the marriage bed,
her willing sister in the woods,
needing one for the power she gives,
wanting the other for what he takes,
longing to be set on fire.
The wife
She needs her husband to feed
the sense of self he's changed in her.
Ignorant, she wants her sister
for comfort when crying's done,
She is an island of kindling -
bits and pieces
of broken bottles, crumpled-up newspaper
and other things tossed out
into the ocean
forced to swim, wet
and freezing, forever gathering,
to form a huddled mass of leftovers
The sister
She is a tightly sealed mason jar
full of captive fireflies,
pillbugs, caterpillars and moss
and not enough air holes in the lid.
Without, she thinks, need,
she only wants her lover
and sister to be gone,
the family, hers alone.
The questions
I fear these things will die inside of me
and the child,
too, is a mason jar
Full of brightly colored
off-brand jellybeans
with a thick black question mark
painted on its face.
When all are found objects
to be used for reasons we hold alone,
what are the forms of ******,
and who is killing whom?