Three Poems

by Benjamin Goluboff

Group Portraits by Danny Lyon

The young women locked up

in the Leesburg stockade. 

The Clarksdale cops making

lewd gestures at the photographer.

White boys on a Chicago stoop

looking tough for the camera.

Kids on a Manhattan playground,

“A-Train” tagged behind them.

Danny never courted his subjects

or adjusted their placement in the field.

They stood or sat as they sat or stood

and the camera found the logic.

Danny Lyon and the Categorical Imperative 

And for sure there were times 

when Danny believed the camera

conferred on him a moral exemption,

when he let the camera take him places

where he could have got hurt, and did, 

places where he should have intervened, 

and didn’t. 

Danny Lyon (American 1942 –) “Young Latin Male in Paterson, New Jersey’s, Inner City,” 1974, Chromogenic Print. 

He is immaculate cool

walking up on the camera

from across the street. 

Fedora and muscle T

eyes on something 

out of the frame 

and time makes 

him its bitch. 

Time sits on his chest

like the police do

as he moves 

through the moment 

when Danny 

up on the stoop

catches him midstride. 

He is time’s bitch 

in the color exposure

time’s bitch in midstride.

He is exquisite cool

immaculate cool

and gone. 

*See image here!

BIO: Benjamin Goluboff is the author, most recently, of Moe Asch: A Speculative Life in Verse, and Other Poems (Kelsay Books). Goluboff teaches at Lake Forest College and lives in Chicago. Some of his work can be read at https://www.lakeforest.edu/academics/faculty/goluboff/