What We Pin Up

Her kitchen board holds the life she wants to remember:

a postcard from someone else's trip,

ticket stubs from a movie I didn't see,

her parents small and frozen

under the corner of a cinema stub,

the photograph already curling at the edges.

I stared at that photo for longer than she noticed.

Two people I've never met,

their faces tucked under a movie she probably saw alone.

The corner of the frame is brown with age

or maybe just the climate of her kitchen—

the heat from the stove, the steam,

all the things that warp paper slowly.

This is how we keep people:

pinned to a board, behind other moments,

the new memories covering the old ones

just enough that you have to look

to find them.