Ashes that Remember Our Names

By evening, the room has that orange hush

that makes the smallest sounds important—

the grate clicking as it cools,

the soft sift of ash making snow of the rug’s edge,

Your cup returning to the table like a careful thought.

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We packed the loud parts first:

books, frames, and the clock that scolded us for years.

What’s left is the quiet inventory—

the outline of the television on the wall,

a pale rectangle where sunlight used to park,

Two grooves in the sofa from our favorite arguments.

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The fire, almost out, keeps revising the night.

Flames stop speaking in paragraphs—

turn to footnotes, then to an asterisk of ember,

the kind that blinks the way a tired eye does.

I poke the logs, and the poker answers in sparks.

a brief constellation, then a cooled sky.

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Ash remembers in gray relief:

the knuckles of bark, the nerve-map of rings,

even the seam where my impatience split the wood.

It holds the shapes of what it loved

longer than we can.

Names disappear faster from mouths than from soot.

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You say we’ll be fine and mean it halfway.

I nod the other half.

Outside, the cold rubs its hands.

Inside, heat goes from noun to past tense.

The room exhales a little smoke

and smells like endings that won’t apologize.

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When the last coal closes its red eyelid,

We don’t clap for the dark.

We lift the kettle by its blackened ear.

Pour what’s left of the warmth into one cup, then two.

and read the gray handwriting on the hearth—

how everything that burned

left a trace of being here.