by Sarah Kay
EXTENDED DEVELOPMENT
I.
It didn’t always work this way.
There was a time you had to get your hands dirty,
when you were in the dark for most of it. Fumbling was a given.
When you needed more contrast, more saturation—
darker darks and brighter brights—
they called it extended development.
It meant you spent longer time up to your wrists,
longer time inhaling chemicals. It wasn’t always easy.
II.
Grandpa Stewart was a Navy photographer.
Young, red-faced, with his sleeves rolled up.
Fists of fingers like fat rolls of coins, in photographs he looked like
Popeye the Sailor Man come to life. Crooked smile, tuft of chest hair,
he showed up to World War II with a smirk and a hobby.
They asked him if he had much experience with photography,
and he lied. He learned to read Europe upside down
from the height of a fighter plane. Camera snapping, eyelids flapping,
the darkest darks and the brightest brights;
he learned war like it was a map, thought he could
read his way home. When other men returned,
they put their weapons out to rust, but he carried the lenses and the
cameras home with him. Opened a shop.
Turned it into a family affair.
III.
My father was born into a world of black and white.
His basketball hands learned the tiny clicks and slides
of lens into frame, film into camera, chemicals into plastic bins.
His father knew the equipment, but not the art;
he knew the darks, but not the brights.
My father learned the magic. Spent his time following light.
Once, he flew halfway across the country to follow a forest fire.
Hunted it with his camera. Follow the light, he said. Follow the light.
IV.
There are parts of me I only recognize from photographs.
The loft in Soho, on Wooster Street, with the creaky hallways and
twelve-foot ceilings, the white walls and cold floors.
This was my mother’s home. Before she was mother.
Before she was wife. She was artist.
The only two rooms in the house with walls that reached up
to the ceilings and doors that could open and close were
the bathroom and the darkroom. The darkroom she made herself.
With custom-made stainless steel sinks
for washing prints, washing film.
An 8x10 bed enlarger that moved up and down by a giant
hand-crank. A bank of color-balanced lights, a white glass wall for
viewing prints, a hand-made drying rack that folded in and out
from the wall. My mother built herself a darkroom.
Made it her home. Fell in love with a man with basketball hands,
with the way he looked at light.
V.
They got married, had a baby, moved to a house near a park.
But they kept the loft on Wooster Street for birthday parties and
treasure hunts. The baby tipped the greyscale.
Filled her parents’ photo albums with red balloons and yellow icing.
The baby grew into a girl without freckles. With a crooked smile.
She didn’t understand why her friends did not have darkrooms
in their houses. She never saw her parents kiss
and she never saw them hold hands.
But one day another baby showed up—
this one with perfect straight hair and bubblegum cheeks,
and they named him Sweet Potato, and he laughed so loudly,
he scared the pigeons on the fire escape.
The four of them lived in the house near the park:
the Girl Without Freckles, the Sweet Potato Boy,
the Basketball Father, and Darkroom Mother,
and they lit their candles and said their prayers
and the corners of the photographs curled.
VI.
One day some towers fell.
And the house near the park became a house under ash,
so they escaped in backpacks, on bicycles, to darkrooms.
But the loft on Wooster Street was built for an artist,
not a family of pigeons. And walls that do not reach the ceiling
do not hold in the yelling. So the man with the basketball hands
put his weapons out to rust.
He could not go to war, and no maps pointed home.
His hands did not fit his wife’s, did not fit the camera,
did not fit his body.
The Sweet Potato Boy mashed his fists into his mouth
until he had nothing more to say, and the Girl Without Freckles
went treasure-hunting on her own.
VII.
(And on Wooster Street, in Soho, in the building with the
creaky hallways, in the loft with the white walls, in the darkroom
with too many sinks, underneath the color-balanced lights,
she found a note tacked to the wall with a thumbtack,
left over from a time before towers. From a time before babies.
And the note said, A guy sure loves a girl who works in the darkroom.)
VIII.
It took a year for my father to pick up a camera again.
His first time out, he followed the Christmas lights
dotting their way through New York City’s trees—
little flashes winking at him from out of the darkest darks.
A few years later, he flew across the country to follow a forest fire.
It was ravaging the west coast, eating eighteen-wheeler trucks
in its stride. He stayed for a week, hunting it with his camera.
On the other side of the country, I went to class and wrote a poem
in the margins of my notebook.
We have both learned the art of capture.
Maybe we are learning the art of embracing.
Maybe we are learning the art of letting go.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
Never, not even once. Not even when I wished I could.
What color were the curtains? And the birds outside?
Olive oil. It was all we had. It made my skin soft, smelled for days.
Did you wear a helmet?
Autumn, mid-November. And any time I’m on a train.
How many rungs up the ladder before you knew?
Three-and-a-half times. Even though I lied about it at the time.
Did you regret it?
Blisters. And sore muscles. One skinned knee.
How many sugars with the tea?
L’horloge, minuit.
Where did you meet?
Tiny scraps of paper, mainly. But I kept them anyway.
Will this hurt?
Yes, every day of my life.
LOOSE THREADS
The buttons on the sleeve of your jacket
were cracked in two. Both of them,
on your right arm, were missing their
other halves and existed in forlorn semicircles:
180 degrees of imperfection. Brown buttons
still clinging by a thread to your jacket material
despite their lack of wholeness, despite their
missing appendages. I wondered if you knew
that part of you was missing, I wondered
where the other halves had gone.
If they were together somewhere, lying on a dresser,
two halves that didn’t fit together
because they belonged to two different buttons.
Or if you had lost them both independently:
one getting stuck on the turnstile at the subway,
the other falling off somewhere down a crowded hallway.
We ate sushi and talked about college
and work and basketball and didn’t talk
about love and sex and loneliness
and friendship and buttons, half missing.
And I wondered if years from now,
you would remember where it was you lost me.
PRIVATE PARTS
The first love of my life never saw me naked.
There was always a parent coming home in a half-hour,
always a little brother in the next room, always too much
body and not enough time for me to show him.
Instead, I gave him a shoulder, an elbow, the bend
of my knee. I lent him my corners, my edges:
the parts of me I could afford to offer, the parts of me
I had long since given up trying to hide.
He never asked for more. He gave me back his eyelashes,
the back of his neck, his palms. We held every piece we were given
like it was a nectarine—might bruise if we weren’t careful—
we collected them like we were trying to build an orchard.
And the spaces that he never saw: the ones my parents
had labeled private parts when I was still small enough
to fit all of my self and worries inside a bathtub,
I made up for them by handing over all the private parts of me.
There was no secret I did not tell him,
there was no moment we did not share.
We didn’t grow up, we grew in: like ivy wrapping,
molding each other into perfect yins and yangs.
We kissed with mouths open, breathing his exhale
into my inhale and back. We could have survived
underwater or in outer space, living only off the breath
we traded. We spelled love G-I-V-E.
I never wanted to hide my body from him.
If I could have, I am sure I would have given it all away
with the rest of me. I did not know it was possible
to keep some things for myself.
Some nights, I wake up knowing he is anxious.
He is across the world in another woman’s arms and the years
have spread us like dandelion seeds, sanding down the edges of our
jigsaw parts that used to only fit each other.
He drinks from the pitcher on the nightstand, checks
the digital clock, it is five AM. He tosses in sheets and tries to settle.
I wait for him to sleep before tucking myself into elbows and knees,
reaching for things I have long since given away.
ANOTHER MISSING
His absence is louder than a firework. I have misplaced all the silverware. Tonight I ate an entire meal of cauliflower. In lieu of doing laundry, I turned yesterday’s shirt inside out. My windows don’t close properly so the wind comes in uninvited. I guess you could say I miss him if missing him means that sometimes I forget to brush twice a day. I wear scarves now. Not because they’re in fashion, but because it is cold in my room since the windows don’t close. I wear socks too. I’ve been searching for words. I pee with the bathroom door open. I keep the light on, just in case.
THE CALL
You are at dinner with your beautiful fiancée.
She is wearing a light cotton dress and an
open cardigan (it is yours, she borrowed it
from your closet, you love it when she wears
your clothes, the way they smell like her for
days). The cardigan drapes off her
shoulders romantically. Her collarbone is
better than your high school poetry could
have imagined. Her hands are the size
of lily pads, she sets food upon the table.
Food she has cooked. For you. You are
going to marry this woman. She has
spent all day fighting the good fight.
She works daily for a better world to
raise your future children in. You love the
way she smells. The way she sets the
spoons upon the place mats. She sits
next to you, and unfolds her napkin.
You say grace and thank your gods for
each other. You taste the dinner. It
doesn’t even taste vegetarian. She is
everything you could have hoped for. She
asks you about your day, rejoices in its tiny
victories. The boy you taught to understand
the mechanics of the pulley system, the
girl who finally stopped chatting in the corner.
You celebrate each other. And this is when
a phone call interrupts. It is me, wishing to
congratulate you on your engagement. I
apologize for catching you at dinner, you laugh
and tell me not to worry, you tell her I am on
the line. She smiles and says hello, I can hear
her in the background. You ask if I will be able
to attend the wedding, I tell you I wouldn’t
miss it for the world. I wouldn’t miss the
chance to see you so happy, to see you both
together in your new life. You say how glad
you are I’ve called, how we’ll get together
soon, how you’ll keep me posted on the registry,
the location of the rehearsal dinner. You hang
up and return to dinner, share a funny anecdote
about the two of us from college, she laughs
along and holds your hand; she says she can’t
wait to meet me. After all the stories she’s heard.
Or else.
When she picks up, I can hear the tightening
in the air as I tell her who I am. The fork scratching
across the dinner plate, the way she pretends
not to know the name, clears her throat
as she passes you the phone, says, Honey,
it’s someone for you. But make it quick, will you?
No phone calls during dinner.
FLIGHT
While I was taking out the trash tonight,
a toddler waddled past me, sticky-handed and
rash-cheeked, and I was left thinking
about the children you and I might have had.
It sounds silly now, with you so far on your
way to the future, and me so very here.
But I thought about his fingers gripping—
fists like small apricots—his grey eyes
as wet as puddles on concrete, his shaky
knees carrying him toward a crowd of pigeons,
waving his laughter into the sky.
I thought about wiping his nose on my sleeve,
(little boys are always snotting all over themselves)
I thought about the way his hand would reach.
And you, with your hat to block the sun,
your pants fitting exactly the way pants were made to fit,
a green t-shirt, a jacket that isn’t warm enough.
I thought about you holding him around his waist,
his little-boy belly sliding beneath your hands,
the way you would lift him into the air, calling out to
the flock of pigeons that they forgot one, that they
left this little bird behind.
B
Instead of Mom, she’s going to call me Point B.
Because that way she knows that no matter what happens,
at least she can always find her way to me.
And I’m going to paint the solar systems on the backs of her hands,
so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say,
Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.
And she’s going to learn that this life will hit you hard, in the face,
wait for you to get back up, just so it can kick you in the stomach,
but getting the wind knocked out of you is the only w
ay
to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air.
There is hurt here that cannot be fixed by Band-Aids or poetry.
So the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn’t coming,
I’ll make sure she knows she doesn’t have to wear the cape
all by herself. Because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers,
your hands will always be too small
to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I’ve tried.
And Baby, I’ll tell her, don’t keep your nose up in the air like that.
I know that trick; I’ve done it a million times.
You’re just smelling for smoke
so you can follow the trail back to a burning house,
so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire
to see if you can save him. Or else—
find the boy who lit the fire in the first place,
to see if you can change him.
But I know she will anyway.
So instead, I’ll always keep
an extra supply of chocolate and rain boots nearby,
because there is no heartbreak that chocolate can’t fix.
Okay, there’s a few heartbreaks that chocolate can’t fix.
But that’s what the rain boots are for.
Because rain will wash away everything,
if you let it.
I want her to look at the world through the underside
of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies
that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind,
because that’s the way my mom taught me—
That there’ll be days like this.
There’ll be days like this, my mama said.
When you open your hands to catch,
and wind up with only blisters and bruises;
when you step out of the phone booth and try to fly, and
the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape;
when your boots will fill with rain,
and you’ll be up to your knees in disappointment.
And those are the very days you have all the more reason
to say thank you. Because there’s nothing more beautiful
than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline,
no matter how many times it’s swept away.
You will put the wind in win(d)some, lose some.
You will put the star in starting over and over.
And no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute,
