Family Photo

by Gail Rudd Entrekin

In the old photo of people no one here remembers

the bride, slim and wistful in her pillbox hat with veil,

stands beside him at the coffee urn in a sleeveless,

belted summer white, nothing especially bridal but the veil,

and gazes off, slightly smiling, into the middle distance,

bemused, almost knowing.

                                                   And he, in a good suit, white cuffs

with shiny links, handsome, tall, saying something funny

to someone on her other side, off camera, lightly holding

her uplifted finger tips above her wrist corsage, is unaware.

He has one eye patched, the first thing you notice in the photo,

and you have to wonder what reckless moment brought him that

(he looks like that kind of guy), what unconsidered acts are yet to come.

She looks forward, right through the camera, her lips vaguely curved,

but on a different plane, sensing, almost comprehending, her mistake.

* * * * *

Gail Rudd Entrekin is Poetry Editor of Hip Pocket Press and Editor of the online environmental literary magazine, Canary (www.canarylitmag.org).  She is Editor of the poetry anthology Yuba Flows (2007) and the poetry & short fiction anthology Sierra Songs & Descants: Poetry & Prose of the Sierra (2002).

Her poems have been widely published in anthologies and literary magazines, including Cimarron Review, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, and Southern Poetry Review, were finalists for the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry from Nimrod International Journal in 2011, and won the Women’s National Book Association Award in 2016. 

Entrekin taught poetry and English literature at California colleges for 25 years.  Her books of poetry include The Art of Healing (with Charles Entrekin) (Poetic Matrix Press 2016); Rearrangement of the Invisible, (Poetic Matrix Press, 2012); Change (Will Do You Good) (Poetic Matrix Press, 2005), which was nominated for a Northern California Book Award; You Notice the Body (Hip Pocket Press, 1998); and John Danced (Berkeley Poets Workshop & Press, 1983).  She and her husband, poet and novelist Charles Entrekin, live in the hills of San Francisco’s East Bay.