Michael Dwayne Smith

Camera Lux

The pho­to­graph is scuffed. She is per­fect and vis­i­ble. There is a horse tan­gled in her hair. It will be two years yet before it escapes. She doesn’t know, though she is smil­ing out to you from with­in the picture’s pool, she doesn’t know yet whether next week she’ll have grown or shrunk by twen­ty feet, but she knows size is always shift­ing, and she knows light makes image pos­si­ble. If the mind is a moon­lit room. A wall, a door, a dress­er. Your favorite shirt draped over her chair. One half of the room, cut away diag­o­nal­ly. The room’s oth­er half weighed down by black cor­ners, floor near­ly tilting.
~
Michael Dwayne Smith is a com­mu­ni­ty col­lege teacher. He’s not quite old enough to have been at Woodstock, despite what stu­dents say about his pony­tail, and cur­rent­ly lives in a small California desert town with his wife and son and many animals.