My Best Friend Poem by Chen-ou Liu

A Tanka Prose

I have only two photos of him, and I put them in the bottom drawer of the Boulder Creek desk, his generous gift for my first award-winning poem. One is his prom night photo with a yellowing hue. It shows a late teen who looks like a grown up, clean-shaven and assertive (his father's favorite expression) . The other is one of the last photos we took together. It has burnt edges and shows a middle-aged man with patches of grey hair, disheveled and confused.

after the fire
he struggled with ghosts
in the dark
this tug-of-war now ends
with a silver bullet