Wearing a smile the photographer chose in your yearbook picture
and the wistful faux-fencepost-leaning pose in your yearbook picture.
An old barn, a covered bridge, and a hickory with a rope swing:
quaint country backdrop complete with scarecrows in your yearbook picture.
You think of it as a leather-bound time capsule those fiends designed
to immortalize blackheads on the nose of your yearbook picture.
Pinstriped Oxford, turquoise ascot, and a burgundy sweater vest:
your nanna certainly picked special clothes for your yearbook picture.
Bullies above and beneath, locker room tormentors on each side.
The alphabet conspired to place foes around your yearbook picture.
Though taken in a gymnasium—how many odd years ago?
your hair speaks of a rude wind that still blows in your yearbook picture.
Did you just peel yourself off a gym mat? You have the look of one
prematurely awoken from a doze in your yearbook picture.
After careful analysis of this artifact, we conclude:
you doubt your right to exist, and it shows in your yearbook picture.
You look as comfortable as one who must learn to accept that he
will stand forever wearing reversed shoes in his yearbook picture.
It’s unclear who you plead with, what crime you beg to be forgiven,
but no dam can stop the pathos that flows from your yearbook picture.
They wrote their cursive congrats and inside jokes in the front and back
but who left bitter, plagiarized prose below your yearbook picture?
Behind your back they voted you “least likely to succeed”… and yet…
I could swear a sliver of halo glows o’er your yearbook picture.
A few years (give or take a decade) and find yourself looking at
a face no-one—especially yourself—knows in your yearbook picture.
I’m the author of three poetry chapbooks. My hybrid book, Run Story, is forthcoming in June from Shape&Nature Press. I’m in the bands The Frost Heaves and Hales, The Ambiguities, and Umbral. Umbral’s album Predawn to Postdusk was released in March by Spork Press.