Photo Shop Poem by Morgan Michaels

In this (for sale) photo a lanky youth
(body arched in glaring profile
head thrown back cockily, lips pursed,
leans out from a wall into a dark allee.

A dozen feet or so away,
rusticated and graffitied,
rises an opposing wall
connected to his own by a span of ornate bridge
that launches itself two floors above:

clearly a bridge intended by the architect
in that derivative age, to mimic
Venice's very Bridge of Sighs
over which foes of the Republic
walked, resignedly, to their ends.

The young man's hand is anchored in a portal-
muscles tensed, gripping what-?
An iron bar? We can't quite see.
Clinging to the wall he blows into the air
a great, sombrero-shaped cloud
(it must have been a very chilly day)
You might call it the star of the photo, that cloud-

as you might imagine its author
a vapor-breathing Boreas
like ones peopling the borders of antique maps
from the times when men found allegory edifying-
but depicted here in full, with arms, legs, a torso, etc.

He wears plaid slacks and a guayabera
so you'd think him Cuban, but he isn't-
no, he's the photographer, himself,
a Peruvian, I happen to know-
(don't ask me how he snapped himself)
and married to the pregnant bar-tender of this place,
herself German. It's true- she told me so.

But, back to the picture-
the ledge forms a stony wainscot for the wall
in 2010, as in 1922,
as well as a purchase for the guy's feet
which stand on it, strainedly, as if to say,
'hurry, we can't do this much longer'.

Because of its canted perspective
one takes....