Tim Tracz, a photographer, was kind enough to allow me to choose one of his photos for the cover of my first book, She Took Off Her Wings & Shoes.  I tackled the difficult task of making a selection, finally narrowing it down to two photos.  To me, they were the ones most mirroring my poetry collection.  One photo collage, however, was in a landscape orientation and, unfortunately, wouldn’t work for the portrait orientation of the book’s format.

Still, the collage image with a woman reading in the woods stayed with me.

 

Both the image I chose and that second one were gifted to us by Tracz and hang in our kitchen.

 

 

He also sent us other magical prints I’ve hung by string lights in our staircase.

 

 

 

 

For this blog, I wrote a poem inspired by Tracz’s photo of the woman reading.

 

Apertures

 

The flipped,

Fossilized metal doors

Drift behind her

A century later.

 

Like her iron chair,

The sedan hovers patiently

Awaiting her return

Or forward time travel

 

From brown tinting, hair-tangled moss

Like a chignon let down,

Fish spines of ferns

Long unfurled, dried up.

 

Her crooked elbow sinks into a pillow,

Her other elbow presses her hip

Just above her waist’s narrow canal,

Posed in specked light.

 

The oriental rug

With a fleur-de-lis border

Pulled out from under the forest floor,

Victorian house, and the book

 

She’s not reading flaps open,

A ship’s hull

Parting the waves,

The hundred details of departure.