picture
hangings

(i)

in the photograph
it is night
in the glare of sourceless light
______my father
my uncle, a deer,
____________a gun

they stand in suits
face forward eyes down
looking at the carcass on the ground
between them

light reflects from their buttons
the butt
their shoes
and the dead eye of the dear

legs spread in mid-stride
the gun leans on its shoulder
pointing at my father's eyes

(ii)

my uncle tells me stories of guns
and his best friend
ten years old
hiding behind the rock in the lower field
______just past my grandfather's strawberries
______that i wished i enjoyed
while my father's brother fired a rifle
just over his head until he ran
out of bullets
or was called for dinner

or the time
he tried to hang the same friend
took him to grandfather's barn
and strung him up
the boy stood on the milk pail
my dad holds
in another photo

(iii)

there are no photos of my mother,
just one, tiny, behind a school desk
her fingers touching across canada
in the atlas she poses over
the line of her bangs zig zags
over her brows
like my uncles' cars over the back roads
of St. Stephen

her story is of the tree in her yard

and the boy across the street
likely a ways down the ledge road
because they had no close neighbors
brought his rope and bruised body
to play to her tree
and stood on her swing to tie the rope
______around the limb
______around the neck

my grandmother cut him down with a knife
she used to gut chicken
breathed into the boy
whose father preferred
him dead

(iv)

and i have a photo
______a story
of a boy ______my brother's age
when i was nine
i, guilty,
recall him a bully

he hanged himself
with skate laces
in the rubber floored locker room
of the rink after
hockey practice

he still sits
next to my brother
in that class photograph
______star wars tees and obliging smiles
for a photographer who never knew
the boy died