‘Response to a Letter Requesting the Tapes’, ‘Overview’ & ‘It's the One’
Josh Wynne-Hudson has a fascination with the rundown, the isolated, and the strange interactions between nature and structures. He deliberately frames his photos to capture quiet vignettes that feel like a stage for something more.
Response to a Letter Requesting the Tapes
If I had the tapes, what would you want
me to do? Send them to you? They're not mine
to send. The originals were destroyed at seven years,
per contract. I question your need for them—
the physical tapes, when the information is out there
in the cloud. You must be a swap meet trader—
wanting plastic artifacts famous for being famous
and that's not an accusation, everything is now,
no matter what it is, if it exists physically,
so better nobody has them (the tapes), and I'm not saying
I do, but if I did, I'd rather know they're just
supercharged electrons in the cloud, like ourselves.
Overview
Talk. Repeat out loud what you hear
in the elevator. All languages. Get off at five.
Such a large world. Why say anything?
You're a porch light no one sees by day.
In the wayback tape there you are molting your body
nto others who don't heed until they do—then devotedly.
Shouldn't this be fun? Shouldn't passing
be painless and extraordinary? Overview effect.
It's all a lie. We would all starve without our illusions,
roadways paved to nowhere better, efficiency
to different bottlenecks. Talk, breathe, talk,
sleep until your limbs wither and five
is where your room is for now, next to
the elevator full of strangers from everywhere.
It's the One
It's the one. I'm used to driving.
Rear ends of cars resemble their drivers’.
As I stepped around to get in—a ride home
after Pilates, a block. I walked
from the hotel, refuge from the fire
that missed our house but got everyone else's.
“Get in, Dale, there's room for everyone,
including your walker.” You grabbed
your husband's Academy Award. We're all
too old for this. “Did you visit your pile today?”
Huntress, a server, has been here four weeks
from Texas. Joining the one luck and God
brought together. They live five miles apart.
She saw the fire from the air as she landed.
The house we lost to a landslide in '04
would have burned. The rental we moved into
afterward burned to the ground. Only one home on
our block burned down. Most of our friends’ homes
survived, except two. We have the feeling
nothing terrible happened on our street.
Lawrence Bridges' poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and Tampa Review. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums (Red Hen Press, 2006), Flip Days (Red Hen Press, 2009), and Brownwood (Tupelo Press, 2016).
