An Explanation of Wall Décor

She didn’t believe in photographs. Just the frames, outlining white space on the wall next to the fireplace. The other walls weren’t dirtied enough—the residual smoke from preceding fires fingerprinting pigments of soot into shadows of clouds. The frames were of all sizes. Two, bordered like windows, set the scene for the others, and smaller rectangular ones, antique ones with the paint chipped at the corners, sporadically sat upon a grayscale landscape. The woman had asked her, Why just the frames, and then commented on how the place seemed comfortable. Her answers to that repeated question changed monthly, depending on the barometer. Sometimes, the obvious, was because the UV rays would cause degradation of the photographs. In August she enjoyed explaining her childhood fear of haunted portraits, as, from any vantage point, she could have sworn that the shaded gazes seemed to trace each of her past steps, and know each she was to attempt before she had even decided. But her favorite reply, the one she clung to until her hair turned, was that she had lost all of her belongings in a horrific house fire, the only surviving items being her keyring and mantle clock. Ever since, she refused to develop any visual representation, any photograph, for fear of suffering yet another loss of them. She answered, this again, standing by the mantle, feeling the warmth of the flames and avoiding looking directly into the pit so as not to burn any image of red, of amber, of blue, onto the backs of eyelids closed.

It was never meant to be read

Those thoughts I penned
in navy night
the rotted pages
salt
lava-lead from armpit pockets
meant for stench
of secret faults

I told it all my vices
allowed my ugly to face front
locked my conscience, plainly folded
in the corner of the trunk
as, on the table, open-ended
insults bleeding wooden stains
the sirens that had silenced
spun again

and you were here,
curled like a fistful
lying backward at my spine
breathing
to the rhythm
of unspoken,
unforgivable rhyme