Michael Tyrell
Brooklyn, NY
Of the House Burning in the Background of an Obscure Family Polaroid (1)
I don’t dream about these figures
though I used to, it’s the stations
I dream about now, naturally they’re
harder for dreams to burn up,
town-name station platforms,
the thousand thousand houses
I’ve passed on the commuter rail.
This is called windowing, I heard once,
when clicked-over things
that shouldn’t be in photographs
show up anyway. And
the one house burning
I see only here,
in a background of a small family reunion,
the ones with grudges uninvited, unpictured.
No evidence of this fire
anywhere in the Googled public record.
And in the stations I use in the mornings
another missing-face poster
appears every few weeks,
like a corporation’s favorite employee,
monarch of some arbitrary month.
