The Photog

No one else’s

landscape will be exactly

the same as yours. Either the water's

gone downstream a micro-

metre, or the rocks have aged

a grain in the sands of Earth.

Or maybe the Nikon you've been

toting weighs you down,

like a feather & a camel’s back.

The caboodle will have dominoed

by then.

The clouds have strayed

the length of a fruit fly’s

wing—in your half-Planck

hesitation. Your hands have quaked

a magnitude minus twelve.

A duck has shook her head of

excess wet, a single drop astray,

like you whenever you step

out from the shower. Everything’s

pornographic in the light.

There’s a gnat, grappling for its

life in a silken cirrus;

the patience of the spider that

you’d see—if you focused on the

sapling past the banks—

sloughing off its leaves

as though burlesque.

Take your gaze up to the core

& try again. It’s there in

tinted glass—a cyclist inching closer

to the corner she’ll be struck,

the driver with his

gawp upon the rearview,

pondering how his beard is

asymmetric, or perhaps he spots

the dated, peanut peddler—there

between the lamppost &

the mailbox no one uses

anymore, aflake like seborrhea,

as out-of-place & time

as a fedora—tumbling on the

sidewalk in the undertow of

air; someone in the distance

giving chase—

if it wasn’t for your

blink you would have noted;

if you hadn’t wiped your lens

as if your eye, fretting the blur

of every face you know you’ll

never see again this wretched life.

Andreas Gripp

October 5, 2026

photograph: Vivian Maier (self-portrait)