Inserting Myself into Someone Else’s Picture

       After an untitled photo by Carolyn Hill

I can’t resist standing in Kathy’s place
at the center of this photo—blown up,
printed on fabric—in which she walks
away from the photographer
through a field of tall grass, toward
a hazy blue ridge in the distance,
where sky clings to mountains
like a flannel sheet over a sleeping child.

I feel no guilt at displacing her, as I know
her journey through this scene continues
unimpeded by my intrusion. So, pardon me
if I don’t apologize for the spiky stalk tops
tickling my outstretched palms,
or the cant of my body as I lean into the breeze
rolling up from the valley, or the carroty scent
of Queen Anne’s Lace, or the sight
of its tiny white flowers frothing like surf
between waves of reedy grasses.

Sarah quotes somebody famous—
Rachael Carson, maybe—when she says
humans are part of nature,
and I believe her. I stride
steadily across this canvas field
as if I belong here, a natural creature
of this wide, sloping mountaintop,
surefooted as a centipede.

       first appeared in Kakalak 2025: Anthology of Poetry and Art