About Photo #11

Life Magazine
Photo Department
July 29, 1949

To Whom it May Concern:

I opened the Retina’s lens and lined its protruding
Nose with two young Navajo girls
Walking the Rio Grande in West Mesa.
Juicy pink bands rubbed the dark, early morning sky.
Sandia Mountains spiked the horizon like sliced
Watermelon. I focused the frame
and narrowed the aperture. With wild, black manes
Whipping in wind, the girls sprang after a Whiptail.
I snapped. Jolted by the sound, one turned —
Her dark eyes cool as an atomic bomb,
Her body, like Kirtland Base, a mystery.
The lizard slipped away. I backed up,
Lowering the lens. Back through cottonwoods,
I slipped from the scene, but the girls stained my mind.
I left them alone on the Rio.
You see them now on the Rio, two seeds against the sky.

John Yerger
Freelance Photographer

*Leann Frola graduated from Penn State in May 2006 with a journalism degree, and English and Spanish minors. She completed a six-week fellowship this summer at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, where she took classes and wrote features for www.poyntersummerfellows.org. She also studied abroad in Salamanca, Spain, in August. Leann's poetry has been published in Penn State's 2006 literary magazine, Kalliope. She also won a Mathew Milhelcic Poetry Award from Penn State's English Department this spring. Leann worked at Penn State's student-run newspaper, The Daily Collegian, for three years as a reporter, then as the assistant copy desk chief. She also tutored at the Penn State Undergraduate Writing Center. She interned at Pittsburgh Magazine and the Tribune-Review, a newspaper in Greensburg, Pa. Now, Leann is looking for a job as a reporter at a daily newspaper.