Dark Rooms

Editor's Choice: 2025 Charles Simic Poetry Prize

At eighteen I got up early and hitchhiked out of town. Hitchhiked all morning.

And when a man put his hand on my leg I took his picture. He didn’t look at me

again until I got out of his car.

I was braver then. The camera conferred an almost supernatural passport —

a kind of super power. Conjured a new origin story. For once I owned the sidewalk,

crossed barriers with ease that said “No Trespassing.” Photographed the guard in

the booth on his break with his coffee and a cigarette who didn’t tell me to leave.

Photographed the town drunk.

I had a darkroom once. Knew how to roll film around the canister in pitch black,

somehow managing not to fall backward into that bat cave. I knew how to develop

the image, agitating it, bringing it up through the glassy liquid in the tray. Its little

chemical placenta.

The first hint of an image, like a dream filling in: arms, legs, nose, the raccoon

killed by the side of the road. A young woman holding her toddler on a peeling

porch an early Maine morning, as old as the women Dorothea Lange photographed

in the migrant camps, becoming dust in the shacks they were shackled to.

Bodies coagulate on the sheet of paper like apparitions. Someone has come to tell

you what the dead want you to know. In the darkroom you make invisible things

visible. A magic trick, a kind of second rate resurrection. The camera around your

neck feels like the finger of God.

Joanna Young was the writer-in-residence at Millay House Rockland for the month of October 2025. Raised in Massachusetts, with generational roots in Vinalhaven, Maine, she now lives in Searsport. Walking with her dog Moxie on Moose Point nearly every day, she “feels initiated into a world of extraordinary beauty, mystery and healing. There is something about the horizon line that teaches me — creates a sense of reverence. In this space, this felt infinity, I feel myself open, begin to find words.”