[Elizabeth Soto, Associate Editor: Ace’s poem encourages me to look back at old photographs of my mom. To be startled when I find her in my mirror. He is capturing this sense of ownership in these words, the way the camera captures. The way memory captures. The yearning of the hands to capture that which we must make ours.]

I know something about the apostrophe   the part that says I own   I also know something of the dry river and the brown dust that coats my shoes   I know something of the debris in your hair and your eyes   how it perseveres and will not leave my pores   my mother’s face startled me the other day   appearing as it did from under a photo of a tractor and a man with a hoe   there was such precision in her smile   as if she were still alive   a strong odor to her teeth in the midst of so much white   I stuck my fingers into a pile of ash from her cigarette   just to make a mess   or simply to make a drawing of it all