A Baby Picture
The blond toddler in the picture is going gray
as the Polaroid fades; her poufy dress, powder-blue,
splotching to egg-white. Second, third birthday?
The playground near my aunt on Canarsie Avenue?
A metal chair on chains—a baby swing,
mid-century and no doubt outlawed since—
is where I’m displayed, chubby-fisted, glaring
at someone beyond the frame who offers peppermints
if I smile, probably. My face
was stylish then—“a rosebud mouth” they said—
supplanted by a notion of beauty nowadays
of gleaming choppers bigger than your head.
White leather baby shoes (made only in white),
with choking-hazard laces, on my feet—
they once were just “my shoes,” but by some sleight
of hand they’re cartoon clipart, obsolete.
Look harder... Try to remember late May sun;
the quiet old men on benches, pungent cigar puffs
tinging the air; the scratchy crinoline
under my legs; the feeling of never enough!
of swinging on swings... I keep it on my bureau,
this snapshot, because the ones who kept it on theirs
passed beyond time. Nearly a lifetime ago.
I’m still bewildered, sometimes. As I stare,
the child, dwarfed by the blackening cyclone fence
behind her, seems almost to disappear.
To belong to another time is a death sentence.
Yet I marvel I was there at all. And still here.
Carole Bernstein is the author of poetry collections Buried Alive: A To-Do List and Familiar (both Hanging Loose Press) and And Stepped Away From the Circle (Sow’s Ear Press). Her poems have been published in journals such as Antioch Review, Apiary, Bridges, Chelsea, Hanging Loose, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, and Yale Review, and in anthologies including American Poetry: The Next Generation, Moms on Poetry, The Weight of Motherhood, Poetry Ink, and Unsettling America. Work is forthcoming in Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State University Press).
Amethyst Review 