The Components of Dust

CATHERINE ZICKGRAF

are pieces of your unglued skin that shroud

mite carcasses once dining on them—

drowned now in their own food—

your blind cat’s scant eyelashes,

fibers sloughed off thread I strung through a button

two nights before they buried you in your beiging church shirt,

pollen your funeral daisies exhale from their fluted kitchen jars:

they form faint blankets of gray fogging up the mantel,

our headboard, your work boots perched by the door—

they’re my souvenirs of you, your cells that snow on my cheek tonight,

my comforters since you died beside me under these thinning sheets.