K. Hazzard

Chicago: Pianola Roll

(gelatin silver print by Edmund Teske, 1938)

Wrapped in its binary shawl,

becoming

                    brush and non-brush,

        that field has style

A far cry

                    from the wrapping table

                    at Mandel Brothers Department Store*

                    where he worked as a boy,

                    before becoming

                          Californian,

one of Wright’s “free fashioners,”

fond of “organic unfoldment,”

with an eye for obsolescence

Nearly twenty years later, 1955:

his abandoned ice-box series,

   each portrait not his father,

   Chicago ice-vendor

*