Settling

by me

(This is a restructured and renamed version of Dust.)  

           Grief gongs like the alarm clock going off the morning after her death. Presses its hand against your stomach when you realize you have woken up. It was not a dream. Tastes like morning mouth and whiskey, slick grit across your teeth. Settles its residue in your room, like musk, like dust: 90% comprised of dead skin.
           Some mornings you marvel at your own fat fingers, their spring and coil, the blue curving veins. Some days your body starts running for no reason other than motion, shifting muscle a joy newly discovered, and some evenings it forgets to be warm-blooded, curling inward, inward, like paper set to flames.
           After she was found hanging in her bedroom, your body rattled and heaved until you did not recognize its shape. That night the white bone of the moon rose above the distant hills, settling in its unbounded stillness, and your body yearned forward, outward, falling into it like a promise, and settling.