The photo is like a bonus. It's a haunting, fascinating shot and is very well used in this piece, it's wonderful and perfectly appropriate, but I think it's also worth noting that your words here are easily as powerful, evocative and haunting as that picture. You accomplish the same task as the photo, but you go about it with some of your sharpest word play to date. This is also some of your best storytelling to date as well. I don't think any reader is going to be able to get those last three stanzas out of their dreams anytime soon.

You had me in the darkness after that picture, and the poem only got darker from there. Haunting, and demented, and black, and fantastically well written.

I find your poems to be the hardest for me to comment on. In terms of inspiration and affect, one rough third of your poems read to me as if they were written by a female version of myself -- I get caught in the parallelism between what I read written by a woman and what I have experienced as a man -- another rough third read to me as if they were written to me -- I think "my god, I have been the person she is speaking of, that she is speaking to" and the guilt, or frustration, or admiration, or temptation well up in me like wet fire -- and the last rough third read to me as a schizophrenic mixture of the two: I cannot help but feel as both speaker and spoken-to; the one who consumes and the one who is digested. I have my own "bathtub incident" and I too have taken the role of the one insisting on its reality -- and of the one running away from its reality. I can't comment on this. This isn't poetry, not in the sense of it being subject to commentary. Yes, it is powerful and well-written and intense: the images, the pace, the sound of it, the voice (oh, god, this voice: I can smell and taste the blood on your teeth as your tongue forms these words and I know that swollen feeling, my own tongue, another person's tongue, and I am torn apart wondering how much of that blood is yours and how much of it is mine and then I remember that I am not you, I am not him, this has nothing [but everything] to do with me). Here's to being an anchor without a boat and to laying claim to that which shouldn't be at stake. It is horrible, but if it's what we got then let's go ahead and revel in it: at least no one can take away the fact that we gave our respective everythings everything we had. I love you and thank you for sharing this.

The poem itself is very poignant but the photograph just adds to that. This is a haunting, yet awesomely written poem.