Jana Prikryl

Her hair is parted in the center and this side wall of the house ends just above her part. The seam between the house and not-house seems to rise out of the part in her hair. Dandelions on the lawn are playing sundials, their globes give out the time of year. She’s not smiling so much as grimacing against the pull of the brush and squinting against the sun. Nowhere are her feet more than tacit. She is the tallest one.

Anonymous

The whitecaps blink like second thoughts or action captured through a fledgling medium, made sweet and anterior, already posthumous, trinkets. A building of pale stone stretching out behind. Stately, in other words. Modillions between windows even at ground level and awnings pulled in. Shadows short as a breath caught short, midday. To the right of these two, a third girl is centered in the center of the picture. She seems to sway, making a window between her waist and that of the tallest girl. We see through this window to a window behind. But she leans toward the tall girl, cocks her head, and looks at you. It’s the look of a friend who knows you well.

Anonymous

Above these three pairs of dark patent boots on the highest of three steps, where three of the six toes jut out past the nosing making three little cups of shadow hanging from the top of the riser, each little cup falling over to the right at exactly the same angle, three columns of girls in long coats rise between two dark pillars on a porch, three bright numbers running down the right-hand pillar: 1 7 6. All three wear hats, each hat forms a porch around each face, each face smiles from its porches into the aperture.

Anonymous

Just in front of the porch steps, on a flat stone that appears partially tucked under the porch, a ficus in a clay planter. It produces strange sounds. The silence that comes dressed in not the past but conditional tense may be quietest, it’s endured the most.

Anonymous

Their dated shoes are hidden in a cloud of grasses of the kind she’s holding in her hand. The sound of a strand of wild grass ripping has something human about it, you feel the earth’s scalp object, and that’s where you assert your difference from the earth, an unexpected homonym, in your own perception quickly forgotten of how a patch of soil resists you and then ceases to resist and then the grass is yours. This great piece of turf, this photo-realism. He looks into the device with a face almost expressionless, a subject very knowing. She smiles. I’ll be honest with you, it’s difficult to like the men in these photographs. My contempt might be capable of reanimating them, the men alone, so deep does power lodge in them, no that can’t be right when it’s the soil and they the famished little roots.