Photographs my brother’s photographs sit on the shelf in my living room the first one his high school senior picture with him dressed in brown sports coat and wide brown checkered tie his hair down to his shoulders it was 1974 and he should have graduated the year before but was held back in the first grade the second one is the last picture of him taken just weeks before his death wearing his checkered shirt open at the collar it was 1983 and he was thinner older looking smiling outside our parents’ house the sunlight shining in his long hair. Poem by James Babb