Something Left Over

It must have been made and rejected in times grinding gears – a knobby irregularity, a leftover of smelt and dross. This is all there is a gobbet of oven clinker, but behind it I sense cracked teeth, soot seared across burnt eyeglasses, blackened bones, for after the gas came the flames. Here it is, a fragment long convulsed from its own incineration, an irregular rake-off, smithereens dragged across a blind stone floor. This tittle of slag once had to fit something the rough rim of an iron door perhaps behind which an old furnace still cools in faraway minds. A ferrous chip chiseled from a gulag, or a souvenir from an SS campfire meet. There is always something left after the unthinkable, always some spicule of irregularity, detritus to explain or confound as we toss it back into the fire again.