Nancy Tupper Ling, semifinalist

 

Snapshot

 

He took the shot of me back when I was four and he was a gawky teen
with Italian black hair and curls. A Barbie from his sister’s closet rests
in my hands . My smile is demure, pure. All I knew, he was shy like me.
This was before he riddled our wheelbarrow with holes from his BB,
before I spied his shadow in the linden tree outside my bedroom window
and before he parked his red Firebird on our lawn. His friends’ cars lined
his driveway like a matchbox collection. They’d sneak into the woods
to their two-story fort made from crates and shingles.
It smelled of moss and urine and pot.

When he took the picture, I trusted him. Not like the night his mother
phoned for help: David has a gun to his father’s head. Come quick.
Talked him out of it was all I heard that night. When I was sixteen
I awoke to snow and the news he’d shot his lover and her husband
in a warehouse. They found his body in some car in Marlboro.
One hole to his head. And all I could see was that 18 x 20 black and white.
How he framed it just so. Captured the moment like a Steigletz or Salgado.

 

 

 

 

 

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Nancy Tupper Ling of Walpole, MA is a "Poet/Librarian/Domestic Engineer...not necessarily in that order. Stone’s Throw Press published her first book entitled Laughter in My Tent in 2003. Other publication credits include: Potomac Review, Radix, Mid-American Review, Flyway and Thema.