There are some people
you know you are going to like
even before you meet them,
men who cover their yawns,
women who wear backpacks,
little girls with mud on their faces,
little boys who read,
anyone who picks daisies
or pets stray cats,
the glassman with a purple dinosaur
glued to the tailgate of his truck,
the gardener with an old
“More Trees, Less Bushes” bumper sticker,
the waitress cleaning up
maple syrup all over the highchair
who smiles like it was her fault and says,
“Someday I want to have kids.”

—Poem is from Cooper’s collection, Across My Silence (World Audience, Inc., 2007), and appears here with author’s permission.

—Photograph by Benedict (Ben) Francis, Mud Face, is copyrighted 2008 by the photographer, with some rights reserved; image is reproduced here from Flickr and appears with permission under Creative Commons licenses, Attribution 2.0 Generic and Attribution 4.0 International.

Publisher’s Note: Poem-and-photograph combination was selected by L. L. Barkat, founding editor of tweetspeak: the best in poetry & poetic things, and posted to Every Day Poems on 10 February 2017.

Bio: Jack Cooper

Benedict (Ben) Francis

is an actor and amateur photographer who lives in the United Kingdom.