This poem and two other developments are published in The Los Angeles Review.

In October of last year I flew home to take care of my mother after she fell off a ladder and shattered her heel in thirteen places. While at home, I was given a cache of Polaroid photographs of my parents from 1989, four years before I was born. I knew the history, but it was the first time I’d glimpsed photographic evidence of the narrative that had both preceded and dominated my life—an aftermath whose pieces I have spent so long trying to glue back together.

To think through the archive, I wrote an ekphrasis of each Polaroid with a form that I invented for the purpose of this project: twelve lines of equal length so that their squareness might resemble a Polaroid’s picture window. Proximity and distance are the engines of these poems. They're “developments”: erasures sequenced in reverse, where the erasure begins the poem, and then the full text fills in, like a Polaroid developing over time, or like my understanding of lineage, inheritance, and my parents’ lives outside my own developing over time.

This project has expanded into a full-length manuscript tentatively titled Scrap Book. This project examines intergenerational trauma, silence, and incarceration. I’m looking forward to the book hopefully being out in the world one day; until then, many poems from the manuscript are available to read under “Publications”.