Album

In the Album I Never Kept All the Photos Are of You

The wide angle lens makes your face fuzzy: the aviator glasses and the square jaw. The focus is on the Toulouse-Lautrec mural on 18^th Street. You’re just another guy in a white shirt and skinny black jeans. Even from this distance, your smile lights up all of Washington, DC.

Close-up of a pair of earrings in the shining palm of your hand. Silver and turquoise in the shape of a stylized saguaro, one arm in the air, stick ‘em up. Almost out of frame: my hand reaching toward yours to accept this first gift.

Frank Zappa at a rooftop sushi restaurant in Adams Morgan, come to rest between battle with Tipper Gore. Again, the camera focuses on him not you, smiling with a bit of seaweed caught between your big teeth.

Strobe lights and the disco ball mess with the lighting. Hard to shoot moving bodies in an underground disco below Dupont Circle. I know we’re here somewhere in this crowd bouncing to Love Shack or Rock Lobster or Take on Me. Not my kind of music but I’ll dance to anything if you will, too.

In the distance, the Austrian Alps. In the foreground, me in a fire engine red down vest unable to take another step, unable to sit for all the cow pies around, helpless until you hoist me onto your back to carry me up the hill.

Our wedding photo taken by a guest. You in your only suit and tie, showing all your teeth. Me in an ivory dress we picked out together with a full head of curls. You squeezing me so tight that my head jams into your armpit.

A series of blurred shots taken from a speeding car of tulip fields and windmills and mothers on bicycles with one kid in the front and two in the back. Close-ups of raw herring, still glistening from the sea, with minced onions and pickles to help it all go down.

Me in a bed at the maternity ward, blue paper gown, turquoise paint streaks from the nursery on my legs, counting contractions. You at my side, puffing along, while you eye the stack of Economists and Financial Times you’ve brought for the occasion of your first son’s birth.

The angle of this photo is off, as if the photographer couldn’t stop from laughing. In focus: a bandage-colored bathtub, soapy bathwater, yellow turds. Out of focus: you naked in the tub holding your equally naked son over the water while he obligingly adds new turds to the tub.

Close-up of the second son in his wooden playpen in the middle of the kitchen. He wears a long-sleeved red onesie damp with drool. The photo catches him just as he raises his head. It must be the eyes, too large for his face, that make the head so heavy.

A holiday pic in the woods of Thumersbach. You stand at the mouth of the forest with one son in the backpack, the other on your chest. We’re on our way to visit the elves who live in red mushrooms deep inside these dark woods. Strangely, the elves are never home when we walk by.

Action shot, badly executed. Boys in their tweens in blue shirts, blue shorts, and white knee socks blur across a muddy soccer field. You stand tall among the players, trying to coach them in a sport you don’t play. The photo doesn’t show them mouthing back.

[Your sons stop talking to you or you stop listening. There is no photograph of this so it’s hard to tell.]

The dinner table is set for four: you and me and our sons. I am not home that night so someone else must have taken the picture. Dinner is cauliflower pasta with flecks of red Aleppo pepper and green parsley. My serving congeals on the plate.

A night shot of the garden, the angle strangely low. Light comes from the house where every lamp must be on. It blurs the screen of my laptop where rows of playing cards assemble themselves. My cigarette glows.

[The album pauses as if life has become too much to record or the photographer can no longer find a shot that pleases her. She dogears the corners of each page, playing for time.]

A wide-angle shot taken from the stairs. Water has flooded the basement, one meter deep and room-wide. Crayon drawings fuse into sediment at the bottom of our new lake. The polaroids bleed into a chemical spill, snaking across the water’s surface.

[You have found love on a tennis court. There is no photographic proof. I have to take your word for it.]

In the background, the dunes in Bergen dusted in snow, hiking paths forking toward the sea. In the foreground, a Scottish Highlander and her calf. Through the mop of curls on the cow’s head, long sharp horns protrude. There is no way forward on this path.

The shot is out of focus. It might have been taken by accident or one of our marriage counselors. We sit across from each other, trying to learn to listen again. A spider plant in a macrame holder hangs behind us, its leaves curled in anticipation.

[We start a new album.]

You naked in a plunge pool. The tiles are cerulean, the water is turquoise, the vegetation Balinese. You look straight into the camera and the camera looks straight at you.

You and me kneeling on the stage of the Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture. The man between us is a Japanese actor in formal dress as befits the role of the judge who banished Phillip Franz von Siebold from Japan. You were the only white man in the museum so you got to play the bad guy.

Me at the launch of my first novel. I’m wearing my favorite blue blazer from my lawyer days, my hair short and asymmetric, long silver earrings almost hitting the high collar. I stand at the counter at Boekhandel Van Rossum to sign copies of my book. You took all the photos that day.

You talking to a cardboard cut-out of President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the LBJ Library in Austin. Your head arches back. His body leans into yours. It could have been real life except for the blue and white Hawaiian shirt you wear.

You and me at Schiphol Airport, about to embark on a seven month long round-the-world trip. Your head is shaven; mine is closely cropped. We are both grinning like fools. The bald eagles are ready for take-off.

Me looking at you from a park bench in the Hattori Ryokuchi Arboretum in Osaka. Behind me, all the colors of autumn blur into a veil of amber, pepperberry, and sunset.

You in a hospital bed in Auckland, New Zealand wearing a blue paper gown. The chest drain in your back removes fluid from your lungs. The IV in your arm pumps you full of antibiotics. You smile weakly at the camera.

The kids and I stand in the garden for our group photo. We keep a meter and a half apart, as per the Dutch lockdown rules. The table is loaded with potato salad, grilled eggplant, ribs, salad, and lentils. It is our first meal together since coming home.

Me looking in the bathroom mirror at the yellow film that covers my eyes. You looking at me to take the shot to send to the doctor. My fingers pull the skin down so you can see all of my eye.

At the hospital, in an examination room, in a metal chair just like mine, you by my side on the day that I hear I’m going to die.

A night shot, possibly from a phone. It has to be yours. I am lying in bed with my eyes closed. You hold my hand until I fall asleep.

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With this lyric essay from her unpublished work we want to honor the memory of Karen Kao.

In publishing news, Karen had two more nominations for a pushcart, the prize for the best essays in American magazines. Essays are put forward by the magazine as their best for the year.

The harvest for 2025:

And Before That was nominated by SweetLit Magazine

Tags was nominated by Hinterland, with a beautiful write up by Yin Lim

Cardamon Heals All Wounds was nominated by Pinch

Sarabande, the publisher of Karen’s book Swimming Upside Down has been cut from their National Endowment of the Arts subsidy by the Trump administration. They are asking for support.