Threads / Dregs

spring closet cleaning has been unsuccessful,
seven years in record time. your plain gray shirt

neatly folded and pushed to the recesses of a
new, untethered space, perhaps the longest

an article of clothing has ever spent in the moth-
eaten dark without feeling the warmth of a body.

when archaeologists from the future unearth it
(in this scenario, they discover it before my mother),

they will weave tales befitting a suit of armor
from the seventeenth century, worn by some

tragic knight, whose oaths weighed his shoulders,
how he rescued an equally tragic maiden, and

shed his sinew for her to keep warm and sleep in.
but that is far from the truth. when the news

coverage airs, you will feel a spark of recognition
and call the network to rectify their falsehoods.

tell them about your room, me standing there,
no longer daydreaming the way i got to wear you.

but that would also be a lie, wouldn't it? nobody
in that imagined future will get to know how

gently you held my wrists, shed your threads
like a gift, apologized for the hole near its heart

knowing i'd wear it, skimping on dregs of affection,
just to be reminded of our mirror anatomies.

if there is a proper way to forget our tumultuous
year, i would have done it already: burned or else

transformed into something that can live in light
without my invisible shame staining the fabric.

what i mean is that i miss you. what i mean is
i take your shirt out of the pile sometimes,

smells erased by the wrong kind of detergent,
but even so, familiar and shaped like your ghost.