“Photograph: Ice Storm” tells the story of how a photograph can be more deceitful than people realize. A picture in itself might seem beautiful, wondrous—a place of the past that we can never return to again. However, a photograph can’t tell what had happened that day, who the people in it were, and how they were feeling. Trethewey warns us that a smile often tells us nothing at all. This poem makes multiple usage of commas, forcing us to pause frequently. It is filled with long, often overflowing sentences. More importantly, every sentence in the poem is a question—rhetorical ones. It makes sense when you consider that the narrator is questioning the sincerity of a photo as opposed to human memory. It seems to try to show us that, although