38
2012
NORTH CAROLINA L ITE R A R Y RE V IE W O N L INE
number 21
My Brother, Last Radiation Treatments by Susan Laughter Meyers
Finalist in the 2011 James Applewhite Poetry Prize Competition
Summer solstice
All the little runners in my brain, wearing their best sneakers, have readied themselves. It’s time, On your mark. Today is longer, another way to measure. A wasp investigating the window frame takes light for granted. In the lowest limb of a pine a red-tailed hawk moves nothing but head and eye, every blink an aperture closing. Yesterday my brother sent photos he took years ago – one of me, the youngest, drinking from the fountain at Fontana Dam. I squint and reach, barely tall enough. How well I remember the dress, the soft ribbon of water cooling my lips.
from the Série Noire series (2010), by Stephen Aubuchon
All the little runners want a story about the boy, his first camera – boy of few words – how he, fifteen and snapping close-ups, learned the art. How that summer he took to the woods where he made a white bracelet of snake rattles. Other summers he took to the beach. Lifeguarding. That tan and peroxided boy, that tall shutterbug. The coneflowers out back, their petals at odd angles, look picture pretty and casual enough to be on vacation. Mostly sunny and warm. The little runners, panting – all of them – are in sight of the last turn. Home stretch, though a dark blur just shot past them, a small thing preyed upon, or closing in on prey.
While living in Raleigh, NC, Stephen Aubuchon embarked on a personal project photographing Nazi concentration camps in Poland, which led him to abandon his commercial art career to focus on fine art. His work has been shown at the North Carolina Museum of Art, NCSU, the Durham Art Guild, and many other locations in the US, Canada, and Europe. He is represented by Adam Cave Fine Art in Raleigh. See more of his work on his website and in NCLR 2012.