Michelle Brittan: The Sky Will Look White

Michelle Brittan’s poem appears in Issue 10 of LAR.

The Sky Will Look White

You want to be skiing, like the girls in your class who come back
from winter break with photographs of themselves, puffed inside
their jackets. But you’re sitting by a window in the house of your grandfather,
a man you’ve met twice now. Here, it’s the monsoon season and you are

fifteen, already you believe you’re an artist, insist on only the black and white
rolls of film your father sometimes gets for free at his job. He works
as a cashier in a drugstore, saves money to bring your mother back
every five years to the country she’d left. But in this village you’re alone,

you’ve stayed behind from a drive into the city, because shopkeepers tease you
for not answering America to a question asked in the language you recognize
but don’t understand. Slapping a mosquito on your knee, you don’t know
how to be grateful, so you take pictures—elbows propped

on the sill, lens pressed beyond where a screen would be. In two weeks
your father will develop this picture: the sky will look white, the jungle
canopy drained of green in a deep slope, telephone wires
like a chairlift up the mountain, the raindrops stilled and soft.