Memory, Photography, Poetry, and Debauchery

Have you ever heard of ekphrastic poetry? It's poetry that uses a visual scene or piece of art to tell a story. Maybe this poem is sort of a stretch in terms of true ekphrastic poetry because I am in the picture and I know what was happening--it is not really invented. Still, I think of it as an ekphrastic poem, and while the photo and the poem can stand alone, they stand together so much better.

The eight of us, we were living in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. We were drunk and on drugs. We ended up at this lifeguard tower, all piled in, still doing drugs, drinking beer, basking in debauchery. It was between 4-7am, the hours we passed there. I was the one who stripped naked and ran into the ocean. The waves were so loud, I couldn't hear them laughing at my bare white ass. I didn't care. Maybe I even loved them more for it. @kindstranger is in there too.

I sometimes wonder if without the photo, I would remember the night so clearly. Probably not, right? But that photo keeps that memory so strong, led me to write this poem (some years ago). For the first time since 2013, I will be returning to Zihuatanejo for the first time( in January, with @kindstranger and @amyinautumn!!). When I was there, I stayed for six months, living off my savings and finishing my first poetry book beside the sea, in a quiet town where everything is beautiful and the whole sky turns pink almost every dusk at sunset.

This is almost a true story, as it were. Almost. However, its emotional truth is 100%. If you want to know the difference, feel free to ask me. I love answering those questions.

xoxo

This is a Photograph of the Eight of Us

The photograph is the eight of us
sitting on a lifeguard tower at
5am. One of us has her eyes closed.
One of us is thrumming a guitar. One
of us is holding his hands together
like a prayer around a beer bottle.
What you can’t see in the picture
is this: eight bodies crammed into
a small car, legs and arms
pressed together in the salty, sweaty
after hours of the night. Powder in tiny bags
with blue tape sealing them shut. Some of us
are lovers, but you’d never guess which, because
it isn’t until later, much later, that they are tracing
slow tangents across each other. What you can’t see
in the picture is the ocean. It is in front of us. Perhaps
if you look hard enough, you can see it in our eyes,
white waves collapsing onto the shore,
a rush forward, a tough pull back,
shadowed hints of itself
left on the sand. Which one
strips to nothing and makes a run for the sea
as the morning splits into light,
and which one believes all souls
form a fortress folding deeper
and deeper into time, who
believes in nothing
but the physical world
in front of her and all of its
atomic nuances, moonlight, sunrise, Pacific ocean pushing
into land, music drifting from the lifeguard tower, voices,
all of our hands grabbing each other, our eyes guiding
us somewhere, inward, in between breaths,
another world is it? And
where were we before this, and where we will go after?
This is the last photo
in which a mother and a father will appear together
though they know nothing of this yet.
Somewhere in our bodies we are smiling,
and in this one fast moment,
we are in love, we are true, we don’t need to
exist anywhere but this photograph. So
we don’t.