Dust Anniversary by Rachel Loden

Write a secret on a piece of paper and burn it.

This was so long ago, today it would have been our dust anniversary, our dross anniversary. No one can convince me that your hair was ever that color. No body lies in a drift of light and smiles so languorously.

The clerk at the Hall of Records led down a corridor into yet another room of papers, stuffed into folders without ceremony. I came to prove that you ever existed, to enter some last page number into evidence.

I thought by now you would have been torn to pieces by the Thracian women. Surely your name is disappearing from this poem, even as a scrap of creamy paper curls into ashen ribbon and is gone.