NaPoWriMo #19 - Keep the Prose Poems Coming!

Thirteen Frames, and We’re Not Bowling

There is a wall of me in the house I grew up in. Thirteen frames from birth to death. Well, from three to high school, but what, really, is the difference? There’s the day I posed for the slick young photographer who got his jollies arranging the leotarded legs of preschool tap-dancers. There’s the smart-ass not-quite-teenager who just had sex last summer. There’s the white jade frog my half-brother gave me for Christmas. He bought it from a traveling Catholic school kid selling trinkets out of a cardboard suitcase. Lucky we have that one on film. The middle school girl-bully threatened my cat and my mother if I didn’t let her wear that for her seventh grade school picture. Wait. That’s her necklace. I never owned a frog in my life. I did, however, lie still on the twin bed at the lake one summer, counting frog croaks and mourning the passing of my twelve-year-old youth. The summer before the fall I turned teenager. Thank god for family photographs. Everyone should have a wall of me.

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This was inspired by Christine at This Is All Your Fault. She has a great prose poem with framed things. Go. Read it. You'll be glad you did.