Some photographs capture moments memory refuses to acknowledge. This is one of them—an image of a photograph, a relic, a birthday in a dining nook somewhere in rural Ohio, early 1980s. Two sisters acting the part. A boy sits at the center, with a well-practiced smile. An eyeless child smile.

The scene appears ordinary. Plain. Almost forgettable. And yet something unsettled moves beneath. This poem is less about nostalgia than inquiry. Who is that?

The stranger in the picture is me.

There Was Cake

There is a boy at a table
wearing a face, my face,
like a plastic Halloween mask.

He rests his arms carefully
on varnished wood
as if he was shown
how to be.

Two girls lean toward him.
They know him.
They orbit him
with casual gravity
the falling toward
of shared bathrooms
and hallway arguments.

They do not know him.
Not really.

There is a cake.
White-iced and saccharine.
Letters tube-squeezed, obedient cursive.
Candles stiff with duty.
Witnesses unwilling to testify.

The room’s light
already dead once—
chemically preserved
in a glossy, fading square.

He/I in mid-birthday.
Mid-childhood.
Mid-innocence.
Mid-somewhere-I-no-longer-am.

I search my mind for the door
and only feel
cheap wood paneling.
Folding, louvered doors.
A reflection in a table
more solid than the memory.

Where/Who was I
when this happened?

Did I trip out of my life
for an afternoon
and forget to return?

The photograph insists
that I was present.
The table insists.
The candles insist.

Memory is a shitty landlord.

It razes, renovates without notice.
Forces out entire years.
Forwarding addresses
written in invisible ink.

This smiling boy ages
each time I look at him.
He advances
without moving.

I am here—
staring at a dining nook
that once held me,
my sisters,
and now sucks in
only light
that stubbornly
won’t forget.