Photographs of her great-grandmother
are aging badly in a Case Closed, Minnesota storage locker,
and someday she’s going to be willing to murder
the motherfucker who won’t let her get to them.

For now, she just remembers the one
that nobody still living in her family likes to talk about.

That one that may as well have been created
by turn-of-the-century, Midwestern magic.
Since no one knows who took the damn thing.

Dirty hair in a black and white cemetery valley that was muddy,
grimy and beaten valentine bloody by a sun
as big as a city made out of old issues of National Geographic.

Barefoot, carefree just enough to shy away from broken glass,
and you can definitely see the stains all over the scissors
in her left hand. You can easily assume she was trying to find
the right hymn to clear her mind of everything else.

It’s a photograph that kept her up nights
more than anything else when she was a little girl. She kind of
wants it back, put it in a drawer somewhere.

The other photos,
the older and uglier ones,
the crisp, calm ones,
she can take or leave them.

What she really wants to know if there really was
a stain on those scissors. And what the pattern was
on her homemade dress.

For some reason,
lately,
and more and more,
trying to remember the pattern
makes her suddenly start sobbing so hard
that her stomach turns, and she shakes so hard
that someone inevitably records it,
and puts it on YouTube.

She’s faintly aware of being a minor celebrity,
and she’s wondered more than once
if that could somehow clear her of any charges
that would come out of what she would have to do
once she got to Cold Case, Minnesota.

She never met the woman,
and she has no idea if any of the other photographs of her
were taken after that one.

Nothing but fields and the country road behind her.

And she has no idea where her great-grandmother
was going with those scissors, that goddamn dress,
or that filthy hair.

12/20/2012

Posted on 12/21/2012
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