Rothstein to a Steer Skull

After Arthur Rothstein’s 1936 photograph Skull, Badlands, South Dakota, and the subsequent photo-staging scandal.


To introduce America to Americans,
I will show them fear in a bowl of dust,
from photo-tints the hue of dirt and rust,
the desert, real, emerging from the sands.
The rain follows the plow, they said, the plow
following, in turn, the thirsting steer,
But dust rained down instead. It would appear
appearances are all we trust, like how
you bones of truth are there, and are unbroken,
but meatless jaws are mute, so, to be spoken,
bones require muscle; truth, a token.
A certain slant of light, on different days,
can hit the truth and cast in different ways.
Its shifting shadows argue what it says.

Daniel Galef’s first book, Imaginary Sonnets, is a collection of persona poems all from the point of view of different historical figures, mythological characters, and inanimate objects, including Werner von Braun, Lucrezia Borgia, and a breakfast taco. His flash fiction about J. Robert Oppenheimer was published in Juked and the Best Small Fictions anthology.