Albrecht Baker
There’s nothing more pitiful
for the living
than the sight of an abandoned body.
So many of us were abandoned.
Even the light
and the dark had quit our bodies.
What does that kind of neglect
even look like?
Something about finding a man
when the day is finished with him
but before the night
is ready to wrap his body into
the weathers of the earth
brought me to photography.
Both the theater of it and its
veracity raise people to their meridian
or drop them to nadir.
Everything was suppressed
during the war. My photographs resist
all types of
abolition. They are confirmation.
They establish. When the guards interrogated
me about sexuality,
I was confident, and replied,
Ja, ich bin schwul. Everybody knows that!
What were they thinking?
As though they were trying to deceive
me into a confession that I
was already proud
about, dignified and eminent.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 21, Issue 4.
Christian Bancroft received his PhD from the University of Houston and is the recipient of a Michener Fellowship. A semifinalist for the 2018 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and the 2017 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, he is the author of Now Sing: Reflections on Modernism and Queering Translation (under contract, Routledge) and the co-editor of the 2018 Unsung Masters Series volume, Adelaide Crapsey: The Life and Work of an American Master.
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