print previewback CLAUDIA EMERSON
Photographer
It began with the first baby, the house
disappearing threshold by threshold, rooms
milky above the floor only her heel,
the ball of her foot perceived. The one thing real
was the crying; it had a low ceiling
she ducked beneath—but unscalable walls.
Then she found with the second child
a safer room in the camera obscura, handheld,
her eye to them a petaled aperture,
her voice inside the dark cloth muffled
as when they first learned it. Here, too, she steadied,
stilled them in black and white, grayscaled the bee-stung
eye, the urine-wet bedsheet, vomit, pox,
pout, fever, measles, stitches fresh-black,
bloody nose—the expected shared mishap
and redundant disease. In the evenings
while they slept, she developed the day’s film
or printed in the quiet darkroom, their images
under the enlarger, awash in the stop bath,
or hanging from the line to dry. Sometimes
she manipulated their nakedness, blonde hair
and bodies dodged whiter in a mountain stream
she burned dark, thick as crude oil or tar. The children’s
expressions fixed in remedial reversals,
she sleeved and cataloged them, her desire,
after all, not so different from any other mother’s. 
Reprinted from Figure Studies, 2008, with permission from Louisiana State University Press and Kent Ippolito.
Photographer
Triptych