honey · liquorice · L·Co · some past winter
a single sweet, oval, the colour of dark honey, stamped with two letters and a stop. it has lost its waxed-paper wrapper and acquired a thin coat of pocket dust, which it wears the way a coin wears its years — as if dust were part of what a lozenge is for.
it is the last of a tin you carried through a cough that lasted nine days. by the time the cough went the tin was almost empty, and this one rolled into the pocket-lining seam, where it lived through a spring, two ferry crossings, and the small disgrace of being washed and dried inside the same coat. you found it, intact, in the autumn.
you have not eaten it. it would still dissolve, possibly. it would taste of that particular dusk when you finally walked out without coughing, of the chemist's bell, of the relief of being able to speak again. better, you think, to keep it as a token: the last of an illness, kept like a tooth.
field-note · turn it: the stamped letters catch the light differently on each side.
handkerchief · pebble · kitchen · ritual · breath