Phantom Ekphrastic

photograph by Sebastião Salgado, Migrations (Kabul, Afghanistan, 1996)

there is a woman holding a plastic leg
there is your mother soft and draped

two white sneakers
in her other hand

her face turned her head veiled
her expression pleased it seems

she is humming to you
telling you everyone who’s

waiting to see you at home
what you will all eat

she stands at your bedside
as she clips your leg back on

look how she cradles the heel
like another child

Andy Young’s second full-collection, Museum of the Soon Departed, was chosen for the inaugural Patricia Spears Jones Award and will be published by Camperdown NYC in late 2022. She is also the author of All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos Press, 2014) and four chapbooks. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Southern Review, Pank, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Cortland Review. Her poems have also been featured in contemporary and flamenco dance productions.