By Jory Mickelson

[One translation of the Arabic title is when a camera’s film is literally burned by the sun] 

In the photographic crypt in Lebanon,
Studio Scheherazade, where amid the hundreds
of thousands of negatives sometimes 

an image will emerge of friends,
lovers, or something in-between, same-gendered
couples playing marriage, behind 

the photographer’s screen, unable to be taken
into the afternoon’s harsh light, the small town’s streets,
where, if exposed all is ruined. 

So too, in the layering of history,
every Egyptian hieroglyph gives you side-eye.
Each Persian relief: 

side-eye, maybe smiling. But an Akkadian
never deigns to look at you at all, a glance beneath
their dignity. Their eyes  

on some king in symmetrically crinkled robes
& perfectly tasseled hair, stiff as the ceramic smocks
of the Sumerian votive statuettes— 

the Sumerian’s eyes enlarged
because their eyes were watching a god—
until we carted them off  

to some white-walled museum where they look
now upon the lookers, praying their dusty prayers,
in climate-controlled absence.  

Our prayers, too, will go unseen
or be lost beyond our time, the gods forgotten,
and every couple a speculation.

---

Jory Mickelson’s first book, Wilderness//Kingdom, is the winner of a 2020 High Plains Book Award. Their second and third books, All This Divide (Spuyten Duyvil Press) and Picturing (End of the Line Press) are forthcoming in 2024. Other publications include Court Green, Poetry Northwest, DIAGRAM, Jubilat, Terrain.org, and The Rumpus. They are the recipient fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, The Desert Rat Writers Residency, Dear Butte, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. They live and write in the Pacific Northwest.