Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren

The Civil War Photographer

In my portrait studio, I place each
soldier’s head between a metal vise

to keep him still. But things move
too fast in the field.

I photograph what remains
after the fighting’s done: not smoke

but the cold cannon, the burnt-
out mill, the singed hills. Branches

curling inward like a man’s nails
grown wild. I wish I had the speed

& color to capture
the ceasefire, when soldiers

on both sides go blackberrying.
The chaos of their arms

plunging into the gaps,
skin brambling to a blackish-red,

mouths bursting from juice & thorns.
How they hurt for what sustains them.

---

Lenox Avenue

after Romare Bearden's The Block

                         Footsteps pause & pace overhead: lunga,
            andante, while something simmers
in someone else's kitchen—an aroma of split onion
            with crushed garlic cackling in lard.
                         Sound & scent are trade winds

                                        you catch in your mind. Soon
you arrive at the stove in North Carolina
where your great-grandmother is laughing
            at a story back before

                         it became your grandfather's,
then your mother's, repeated like rows of seed
            in loam. You're as much cecil, knotted with red
clay & sweet potato root, as you are these paved

            asphalt streets. From your friend's Harlem balcony,
cars above & below the broken yellow line
            push forward, as if cursive letters
                        on penmanship paper

                                                     where you first learned
            to sign your name. Where you let it fill
the whole page. On your studio table
            one paper sun rises

                        over a sea voyage two kids
            watch on TV—their backs to the window
through which the other sun warms rooftops
                        up & down the block. Both skies

            are the lime-tinged indigo of Southern
doorframes that neither flies nor haints
                        are said to cross. Both suns'
            edges are cut smooth, their texture

            crinkled like bed sheets
or sheet music or your wife's eyes when she laughs
                        to herself. Outside: the moon




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Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren is an MFA candidate in Poetry and Literary Translation at Columbia University and the Dispatches editor for Words Without Borders. Her honors include an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Hopwood Award, and a 2013-2014 Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil; she was also a finalist for this year’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. You can find her work in literary journals including Narrative, Guernica, The Common, Two Lines, and BOMB.