At a Photography Exhibition by Teenage Afghan Refugees

Matthew J. Andrews

Hot coffee, Styrofoam cups,
cookies laid out in rows
and easels arranged in a circle, 
as if around a campfire.

*

Image one: bright yellow 
sunflowers, heads high,
lattice-shadowed by chain link.

*

One man remarks, this is so cliché.
The young artist does not hear him,
is deep in conversation with a woman
fighting back tears. The man throws 
his white cup away, half empty. 

*

Another image: a butterfly
punches its way out 
of a cocoon prison. 

*

I remember no names
or titles but I remember
the young artist
alternating his weight
from one leg to another,
his right hand holding
the left in front of him,
his work standing
by his side, up to his shoulder
like a younger brother. 

*

His piece: budded branches
of a tree sneak like secrets
through a slat in a wooden gate 
and bloom. 

*

Every artist statement: a murder.
The walk between each one: a mourning.  
Their accumulation: a massacre. 

*

Another: a garden with colors
from every edge of the spectrum.
Or so you imagine – the photograph
is washed of color, leaving only 
light and its shadow. 

*

I remember I once learned 
cliché is the creation
of French printmakers, 
who derived it from a word
meaning “to click” 
to embody the sound made 
when crafted molds
were pressed down hard 
into molten metal to create 
a solid impression. 

The critic has already left, 
but he wouldn’t have cared. 

*

Another: a bird takes flight
next to a decrepit building. A window,
busted, shards spilled like blood,
haunts the background. 

*

I lose myself imagining 
my children buried under rubble 
after a building has exploded 
then collapsed like a dying star, 
my wife dragged by her hair 
from our house, bodies
piled on the street’s edge like plowed snow. 

*

Another: a young woman
in a hijab looks away 
from the camera, facing the past, behind
her. We look with her, but we cannot 
see the things she has seen, is seeing. 

*

I learn the Farsi word for art: هنر.
A woman, the mother of one artist,
tells me to pronounce it by saying honor
with the words coming from deep
down in my chest, near the heart. 

*

Last image: the sun rises 
over the valley we share, this home
of ours, the rays illuminating clear skies,
thick groves of almond trees, green
with life, a house with an open door. 


Author Photo, Matthew J. Andrews.jpg


Matthew J. Andrews is a private investigator and writer who lives in Modesto, California. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Funicular Magazine, The Inflectionist Review, Red Rock Review, Sojourners, Amethyst Review, Kissing Dynamite, and Deep Wild Journal, among others. He can be contacted at matthewjandrews.com. “At a Photography Exhibition by Teenage Afghan Refugees” is a response to a small photography exhibit supported by JAYU (https://www.jayu.ca/) and World Relief (https://worldrelief.org/) that he found to be significantly more impactful than any professional art show he had ever attended.

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