print previewback CYNTHIA HOGUE
Regarding Others’ Pain
Something becomes real—to those who are elsewhere, following it as “news”—by being photographed.
—Susan Sontag
1
She sat on the windowsill
one leg thrown over the green sash
like riding a horse.
The men in the room talked
quietly and she ignored them,
watching a car slow,
the driver leering at her bare leg
and bumping the curb.
He was a doctor or something,
doffing his hat to her neighbor in curlers
on the porch in her nightie.
Mornings the grackles were loud,
and the men grew loud as they spoke
of a burgeoning civil war
and what should be done.
They were all white, and argued
as if the force of their words
had a power they might activate,
2
driving a solution no one anywhere
imagined. They did not think
about how they sounded.
So full of, she thought, confidence—
definitely not her forte—
holding the belief
that words mattered was ir-
resistible when they got
going. She’d never before
not believed them. Now they
couldn’t agree. She’d seen
the pictures of those
thousands insistently refused
refuge, insisting; and observed
how in telling daily
moments the simple
small cruelties proved all
but imperceptibly tempting,
3
the gentle maneuver of with-
holding something, the
kindly (so it seemed)
delivery of no, the half
smile of regret, like a door
shown, after which,
the cutting the person
cold to shame, to
show them who had
the power, or that when one—
calling himself a leader—
yelled out out out
he meant business. Then
people hopped to expel
the outsider whose
mouth—as the crowd
pushed with its pincered
mind—was a perfect O. 
Crocus
Regarding Others' Pain