Cobalt Blue

 

Everybody seemed to have one, always

more or less the same, that photo — the camp

was lousy with versions of that picture, gray

from dirty pockets, fingering, the camp’s

infernal dust — a family, the ones

who got out of the stinking squalid camp

and made it to America, they’d done

it, crossed the ocean of after-the-camp,

after the war and losing the war, got

out of these mountains, this hellhole, this camp,

and in time they sent that picture: a hot

day in Long Beach (never hot like the camp)

or a cold day in St. Paul, and it might

as well be Mars, anywhere not the camp,

and they’re all lined up in order of height —

daddy gone bald, fat (not like in the camp);

mama in her Hmong black skirt, Hmong black turban;

first son, still with his mane from the camp,

keeping his resistance vow that no barber

would touch it, a vow that he’d sworn in the camp;

and then the girls in their ill-fitting clothes,

looking stunned, looking bored, they left the camp

as kids and look, they’re teens — everyone posed

for this photo to send back to the camp,

a survivors’ trophy, a way to say

we’re Americans now, we’ve left the camp

forever but we won’t forsake you, may

you get out of there, too, you in the camp —

look at us, daddy down to grandma, who’s

as tiny as the grannies in the camp —

see how she loves her new cobalt-blue shoes.

 

 

© Michael Fleming

Brattleboro, Vermont

January 2017

 

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