Category: Visual Art

Beyond words and photos

Magic!

My favorite photographs have been unexpected: a double image, something I hadn’t seen when I took the shot, or a photo I didn’t intentionally take yet captured what I hadn’t seen.

photo by Elizabeth

The first shot is what I could see: a sun-drenched hiking trail with rocks and almost no vegetation. The washed out flower at the center of this shot is the same flower in the next, though it was hidden in plain sight till a fluke of light and perspective revealed its magnificence.

photo by Elizabeth

My only edit to the first photo was to reduce the light and slightly increase the definition so the vegetation in the center was visible. The second shot resulted a split second later due to an inadvertent twitch of my finger. I gasped when I saw the second photo, which is unedited, while the third photo is my edit of the second. For me the second shot is what makes photography magic!

photo by Elizabeth

Graffito

poem & photo by Elizabeth

GRAFFITO

Three distinct letters, 
discrete as whispers
yet stark as sunrise,
stain this park’s 
concrete wall. 

S insinuates 
the dark entrance,
secret from those
passwordless,
but once in, one
snakes along this
sinuous passage

toward E, 
which sighs
like a wind-filled
cavern 
in the fold of a word
so bare 
it exposes the language of pores 
opening like stomata 
along nerve-laden skin,
of tongues probing  
tasting  moistening  unveiling
revealing the voracious 
pulse and press of pelvis  
belly  
even neck, bared 
for the thin membrane of skin,
primordial as sound rising 
from ancestral marrow
formed of molten rock and sky-filled sea

before X marks the space 
within and between.

Thank you to the editors of HOT FLASHES: sexy little stories and poems for first publishing this poem.

Touch

poem & photo by Elizabeth
TOUCH

hands awaken 
stars in skin
till our palms
press peace
deep as breath

yet this snow-blind 
animal need for touch
shared by grooming apes
and dogs sleeping entwined
is rarely about sex 

but instead our primal need to know 
we are not stones tossed out to sea
as we breathe the same air
molecules shared
in this brief habitation of skin

Thank you to the editors of 5AM for first publishing this poem.