David P. Miller
Lady Liberty in Photographs
The head, World Fair, Paris, 1878
A bust severed just below the breastbone,
colossal head denoted Monument
de L’Independence, flanked by park benches
poised for Parisian midday slumps.
Men in bowler hats retreat out of her range,
staring stock-still behind a barrier
of bentwood chairs. Others twist
up the spiral stair immured within her,
poke their petite pates through the gaps
below her spiked crown. Skull jewels
for a wrathful deity swathed in shrubbery,
her eyes sunk beneath gathered brows
deep-shadowed on a sunlit afternoon,
beneath a corona of impalements.
The right hand, Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, 1876
Her fist erupted from pond-bank,
loosened to grasp a fire
enlightening the souvenir stand.
Bearded fellers lean and loaf at ease
for the photographer. Two of the curious
have crept upwards through the arm.
Out upon the base of the torch,
they gander the circular view
at the end of the first American century.
Flame grazes their heads.
The face uncrated, verso, Liberty Island, 1885
The Goddess of Democracy’s face stands
inside out in miscellaneous weeds
propped with a tentative wood frame
assortedly knocked together.
We’re naked to her concave shell,
trespassers behind nose and chin
thrust in reverse, her unbroken glare.
Lasered pupils slice the ether regardless
which way her Egyptian gaze faces.
Behind her façade, her skin is black.
David P. Miller is the author of Sprawled Asleep (Nixes Mate Books, forthcoming in 2020) and The Afterimages (Červená Barva Press, 2014). His poems have recently appeared in Meat for Tea, Hawaii Pacific Review, Turtle Island Quarterly, poems2go, riverbabble, Nixes Mate Review, The Lily Poetry Review, Peacock Journal, Redheaded Stepchild, Jenny, and others. Miller was a librarian at Curry College in Milton, Mass., from which he retired in 2018. He lives in Boston.
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