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Firing Squad
Fran Schumer

Three of us are lined up
against the red brick wall of our old two-story house.
We are very young: nine, six, and two,
ages when everything makes an impression, indelibly,
our smiles perfect camera smiles.

Through the lens, we look like the ideal family.
You expect me to say we were not—
the good blown up,
the negative under exposed,
droopy socks, stray hairs,
age-old sorrows and latent anger cropped.

But no, we were loved abundantly,
fiercely, intensely,
our mother a steady current
of hot, electric love,
palpable through the hands
that slicked back my older brother’s hair with gel,
pulled tight my younger brother’s shirt across his little-boy chest,
and brushed my hair so tightly into a pony tail
it brought tears to my eyes
that my mother wiped away
before telling the photographer to shoot.

—
Fran Schumer is a journalist and author. Her poetry has been published in The New Verse News, Hole in the Head Review, Contrary, and Sparks of Calliope. Another poem is forthcoming in Prospectus. In 2021, she won a second-place poetry fellowship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.

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