"Stock Search: Grief"

Jennifer Bowering Delisle

Jennifer Bowering Delisle (she) is the author of Deriving (2021) and The Bosun Chair (2017). She regularly teaches creative writing and is a board member of Edmonton’s NeWest Press. She is a settler in Amiskwaciwâskahikan / Edmonton in Treaty 6.

“Stock photography databases (such as Shutterstock and iStock) are the source of a large proportion of the images in print and digital publishing and advertising. As a genre, stock is notoriously contrived, inaccurate, and replete with heavy-handed metaphors. It has also developed a distinctive aesthetic, featuring unusual camera angles, colour filtering, and exaggerated poses. ‘Stock Search: Grief’ comes from a sequence of poem responding to different search results on stock sites—images that are often delightfully bizarre and dangerously biased or exclusionary. Ubiquitous in today’s media, stock is a reflection of broader cultural values and power dynamics. In turn, stock photography shapes, if only subconsciously, how we interact and define ourselves and each other.”

Grief is in the fingers.
Small creature caught across two laps
or held up to the mouth
as if for kissing
or consuming.

When I was young you often stood
with hands in a sink of water
trying to warm them. Even then
your body was failing you
in its task of milling blood.

My child did not notice
he wore two left-hand mitts all afternoon
and I never knew how much of grief
was seeing what the dead are missing.
The lost one’s loss.

Grief’s image is in blisters
from the monkey bars
fingers wondering little stars
small creatures caught across two laps.