Home Movies

I find them in my father’s attic
while clearing his things for the estate sale,
a carton filled to the brim
with 8 mm reel-to-reel,
all in black and white.

Each box is rubber-banded
and labeled by date, and subject:
Christmas, little league,
trip to Santa Claus Land.
Four minutes each.

That night, braced with a whisky and water,
I loop the leader he had neatly cut
to a point to fit better into the takeup
of the old Bell & Howell projector,
and watch the memories rise

then retreat and finally give themselves
up with each lost reel; my mother
in a one-piece bathing suit,
a squint substituting for a smile.
My sister wearing a necklace

of seaweed, as she stands sun- flushed
and freckled. In one, I am there,
self-conscious and somewhat out of focus
against a background so stark and bare
that I seem to disappear. We hated to pose

for him but went along--
it was easier to stand stiff
than to argue. He keeps trying
to coax a smile from unhappy days.
I live again in the reels trying

to defy gravity, floating between frames
until the reels disrobe from full to empty.
It makes no difference now, this life devoid
of color, of what remains
when everyone else has been left behind.


Richard Luftig is a professor of educational psychology and special education at Miami University in Ohio. He is a recipient of the Cincinnati Post-Corbett Foundation Award for Literature and a semi finalist for the Emily Dickinson Society Award. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in the United States and internationally in Japan, Canada, Australia, Europe, Thailand, Hong Kong and India. His third chapbook was published by Dos Madres Press.