Russell Thorburn

Let Me Make You Bloodless in a Single Flash

Don’t breathe, the camera will not kill you,
the man says donning his shrouded cover

for a photograph of Bass Reeves, who feels darkness
sear skin just as much as the heat of the sun.

The starlight pouring forth in the constellation
catches him turning away to look

at the mountains, as if he were drawn
to something he can’t ever get back,

like his slender wife with the name of Eulalie,
who died in his arms one winter night.

Now Bass wears a windblown straw hat
enslaving his brow in shadow,

his battered shoes bearing the weight
of a man who would never return home.

The former soldier only nineteen years of age
breathes through his bulbous nose 

not knowing why he signed his name
on the form handed to him

with an immaculate white hand
by the fast talking Mathew Brady.

Time for me to go, his feet itching to move,
pick up his discarded rucksack

and walk until he can’t see his steps
disappearing in the inky pools of no light.

A soldier who buried the Civil War dead
bounces a hand off his leg, whispering 

how many souls are contained in a box
of your glass photographs: 

bone, gristle and flesh gone,
he waits for a bullet wound that never comes.

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Russell Thorburn is the author of four books of poems, including Somewhere We’ll Leave the World, published by Wayne State University Press in 2017. He has received numerous grants, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His radio play, Happy Birthday James Joyce, was aired on Public Radio four times, and his one-act play, Gimme Shelter, was scheduled to premiere at Northern Michigan University's Black Box Theatre, on March 13, 2020, but was cancelled because of the pandemic. Thorburn was nominated and chosen as the first poet laureate of the Upper Peninsula in 2013. He teaches composition at Northern Michigan University.