POEM: Dust
Dust
Tonight my room embraces bitter dust.
The hallway light keeps stuttering guilt.
My face forgets its use,
and my storms slow only at dawn.
I tried to cut off the thought of you.
I threw your name like meat to dogs.
I buried it beneath stone walls and ills,
inside the sink’s black throat, beneath my tongue.
Still every object drags you back to life.
The coffee pot bubbling against the wall,
the blue static sadness on the news,
a spoon beside an unwashed bowl—
all of them carried your exhausted voice,
that careful voice that always sounded bruised,
as though each word had slept out in the cold.
Forgive me. I was feverish with care.
I pressed ceremony into your smallest gesture.
I pressed my ear against your smallest sigh
as if the dead were speaking through your mouth.
And you—
you wanted discipline instead of a storm.
You told me grief could turn a room feral.
You said a drowning person drags by instinct.
Sometimes your kindness laughed as scorn.
Sometimes you spoke like someone cauterized.
But then your hands remained humane.
Outside, the traffic keeps inventing distance.
Each passing car un-arms another hour.
The moon hangs in the clouds like a wound.
This cigarette burns with more resolve
than I have shown my own unsteady life.
I’m glad to be burned.
Somewhere, somebody folds a thing with love.
Somebody laughs against another’s throat.
Some woman rinses strawberries in moonlight.
Perhaps you sleep without the ache of me.
Perhaps your body has already learned
the painless joys of my absence.
Meanwhile I move from day to day half-dead.
Even the mirrors seem embarrassed now.
They hold my face and keep my eyes the way these empty rooms do.
And still I cannot make myself unlove.
I tried. God knows I rehearsed disappearing.
I tried to become smaller than a stain,
smaller than steam escaping from a grate,
smaller than breath against a winter scarf.
But sorrow is an animal with keys.
It opens every locked and swollen door.
You were more known to me than my own hands.
Older somehow. Familiar in the bones.
As if my life had circled yours before
through other ruined places, other names.
Now morning soon and slowly at the blinds.
The sky looks about to sob and full of ash.
I am so tired of carrying this life—
this growling bookcase full of underlined margins,
these nerves that hum like electrical wire,
this heart with all its threaded little looms.
If I have wounded you, then let me say
I knew it even while I could not stop.
There are apologies that sour too late
inside the mouth and poison the tongue they touch.
Still—I am sorry for the weight of me.
Sorry my love arrived with broken teeth.
Sorry I turned your silence into judgment
and every absence into its own verdict.
The sun will rise without consulting us.
The buses will kneel down and take on strangers.
Some child will lose a toy in the park.
The grocery clerks will stack their apples.
And I will sit beside the open window
while dawn unbuttons all its dreadful light,
feeling my life drip slowly through the hour
like rainwater escaping through a crack.
Marni Fraser
0516.2026
Photo 2026
