Polaroid of My Parents, Christmas, 1978
Could they ever have been that young—
my father 37, my mother 35—posing
in that low saturation of pinks & blues,
the mist haloing them like a specter?
Yet at that moment, as my seven-year-old
hands fumbled with my father’s camera,
they appeared happy, or so I believed.
Though my father, with his Beatle
mop top & Burt Reynolds mustache,
dressed in a lumberjack flannel,
betrayed an anxious smile—lips
spread too wide, teeth gleaming—
as if gripped by some distant fear.
While my mother sat at his side, all
saintly pale in a red sweater & plaid pants,
her hands folded as if in prayer.
How could we have known then
that this would be the last Christmas
we’d spend together, that before the trees
once again shed their leaves, our lives
would be torn apart—my father
moving out in August, my mother
filling the void with God
& me, their wide-eyed crippled child,
believing it was all my fault.
Jason Irwin is the author of three books of poetry: The History of Our Vagrancies (Main Street Rag, 2020), A Blister of Stars (Low Ghost, 2016) and Watering the Dead, winner of the Transcontinental Poetry Award (Pavement Saw Press, 2008). In 2022 he was a Zoeglossia Fellow and part of the Poetry Foundation’s Disability Poetics Project. His nonfiction has been published in Santa Ana Review, Panorama, The Catholic Worker, and City of Asylum’s Pittsburgh Live/Ability: Encounters in Poetry and Prose Project. His memoir These Fragments I Have Shored is forthcoming from Apprentice House Press.
