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 eternal 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 (but not 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 him, 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, just look: tiny like the grannies in the camp — and now she loves her new cobalt-blue shoes.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont January 2017