Rome, New York
after Austin Araujo
In my favorite picture of you, the hair blown across
your face, obscuring your face, it’s easy to make out,
deep in the distance, the hangers of the air force base
classified as a superfund site, a sprawling huddle
of buildings expanding out into the extent of the valley.
Volatile organic compounds, the report says. Solvents
poured into the aquifer. Hair blown across your face,
obscuring your face, & beyond it, a tree, its leaves
swept in a single direction, further evidence for the wind
that once carried into the rolling green hills the ash
& wreckage of the failed fighter jet tests run by
the bombardment wing. A wind, untranslatable into image,
except for its consequence. A face, erased, blotted out
by the hair that I would part, if the moment wasn’t gone.
Out of sight, like the discarded munitions lining the three
identical landfills the picture lacks the dimensions to contain,
covered, as they are, by sheets of concrete, your face
no longer a face but an artifact hiding what’s hidden.
The film forming foam, the layers of lead-based fuels
that seeped for years into the water wells, now dormant,
frozen in time the moment I cracked open the aperture
of the lens, flooding it with color, overexposing the image
until everything in my sight was obscured by light.
Matthew Tuckner received his MFA in creative writing at NYU and is currently a PhD student in English / creative writing at the University of Utah. His debut collection of poems, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is forthcoming from Four Way Books.
