Tom Jungerberg
A Photograph Taken at the End of the World
White hot moon
tumbling face forward
into a city
where traffic lights make lovely targets
if you squint:
rings surrounding dots.
At eye level,
Mr. Johnston says, "The moon
seems awfully
full tonight, I think
I’ll snap a few
pictures."
He chooses his
lens carefully: enormous
exposure—every
canyon, peak, valley, ocean
molds itself
from fuzz and blur
and then melts
away again as the moon
brands her
image into the leafy clouds.
Mr. Johnston
steadies his tripod and points his lens
towards the
horizon line. Click.
Just testing.
For posterity he often takes pictures
of his wife
after she has her hair done at the salon.
Mrs. Johnston’s
back is towards him and she is staring eastward.
The moon, that
cheesy hag, makes it hard to focus.
The light is so
great that Mrs. Johnson’s head
seems not to
exist: just a gaunt body
holding an
ogre’s halo on its shoulders.
Mr. Johnston’s
finger tightens elastically. Click.
Mrs. Johnston’s
voice hovers over a suggested caption:
"Honey, I think the sky is
falling.
Hooch
Japanese
businessmen at the karaoke
bar across the
street wear their ties loosened
and their top
button undone
and it looks
like their necks have shrunk.
On nights when
the window rattles
with their
amplified voices,
I watch them
from my roof
as they drink
fluorescent
fluids or grope
waitresses with big Texas hair
who only
tolerate them because
of the Andrew
Jackson tips
they fold
lengthwise on the tables
like bad love
poems.
The night
always ends with a tipsy rendition
of "Coming to
America" sung by the
two who are
still sober
enough to stand
relatively erect.
When I hear
them, I invariably
think of my
grandfather who flew gasoline
into China over
the Himalayan hump.
When he was
alive, he wrote that the altitude can knock
you on your ass
like a shot of hooch
and I imagine
that along with the nauseous
stink of
near-death and whatever fumes
came from the
back of their metal coffin,
that the flight
crew must have felt similar
to these
children of the once
rising sun
whose grandfathers
spat fire at my own from the
hillsides.
Tom Jungerberg lives in Tampa
and goes to school in Tallahassee. This is his first publication and he
is jealous of people with lots of italics in their biographies. | 