BURNING PHOTOGRAPHS
Jesse Van Hooser
They say a picture is worth a thousand words
If that saying was true
Then I’d have been able to speak about you until
Our interlocked hands shift to bones
shift to dust
My smile you loved so deeply
sinks into my cheeks
The same smile is reflected in the wrinkled
printed film that rests bursting
within the scratched scrapbooks
clutched gingerly between my fingertips
placed in a bed of ash within the cold iron pit
Your last picture rests between my fingers
the film wrinkled and worn by age
Our figures untouched by the knowledge
of what we would become
I stare into your eyes the same as I had done
hundreds of times before
searching
for a shard of the person I once knew
I tear your figure from my sight
casting the scrap into the pit
The shard remaining unfound or never there at all
All that’s left on the film is your arm
draped over my shoulder
Despite our shared name and the echoes
of his face on mine
the last piece of him
is cast away with the photograph
He never would have wanted this for us
But he never would have imagined we could be happy
without your heart lodging itself in our throat
There is no malice in my actions
no agony
no affliction
You no longer have the honor of my eyes
The newly formed flames lap at the photographs
echoing waves crashing on the cliffside
I once believed our hearts were grown to be grafted together
But once I ripped the thread free
and burned the memories we shared
My smile is paid for and earned
A picture is worth a thousand words
and I have no more words left to say about you.
Author Bio
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Jesse Van Hooser is a Michigan-born undergraduate student at Pacific University studying creative writing and theatre. He has been writing since the fifth grade and to this day refuses to sit nicely in one specific literary genre. Jesse is an experimental poet, creative nonfiction writer and playwright. He has been published in poetry with a piece titled “Swept Away” in The Blank Quill Literary Magazine, in nonfiction for an essay titled “Human Connection: Wired & Wireless” in Garden Of The Mind, and has served as an editor for The Silk Road Review, and a programming intern for the Pacific University MFA in writing program. Jesse intends to never stop writing, and never stop creating, no matter how hard the world makes it.