Doors plastered with red paper cutouts 

so that the oncoming year passes these houses by. 

Sweep out the insistent winter. 

Make what you will out of ritual—

the relative with the steadiest hands cuts the hair of her cousins. 

The husband and the brother-in-law remove every item from the refrigerator 

and arrange it all on the old card table for a Kodak photo. 

It’s the first point-and-shoot in the neighborhood. 

The iron-rich spinach and clementines loose in their skins. 

One bottle of artificial mango drink for show. 

How quickly a photograph can erase all labor. 

It says: we are sated, but the watercress and the pork are unending. 

Frugality and daily rationing cropped out. 

The camera neuters the present, so what becomes past cannot breed.