‘I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped’
Adrienne Rich – ‘For the Dead’

signs from the dead were clotting up the world’s arteries. all sorts of
weird theatrical shit was happening all the time, clouds twisting into semiotic

shapes & dog excrement arranged in profound & mysterious patterns.
I was finding double yolks in every cracked egg & receiving mysterious hoax

emails about God, heaven & cryptocurrency & AI telemarketing calls asking me… have you recently been in a car crash? my psoriasis was flaring up in

sexy & esoteric epidermal crop circles. what were the dead trying to
tell me? there was a very real possibility that I was coating things with a

cinematic glaze. like ancient viruses sleeping in the Antarctic’s thick ice, I was not ready to feel after feeling so much. have you ever seen a salmon cannon?

they are devices that catapult salmon across dams. a commenter on Reddit wonders if salmon think that they are portals to another world. 2017 was the

year of realising things. 2017 was the year I was propelled into another world.
I was writing poems about grief. I was trying to milk my pain dry. I believed

that writing was a way of closing in, getting intimate with the details. I
failed to remember that moving closer to something can mean moving

further away from something else. I wrote about grief so much that
I sucked the marrow out of its meaning. semantic satiation tasted

like a used bandage, so familiar that it started to disgust me. I fracked my feeling core until the meaty centre of my heart closed over. things became

so absurd with sadness, all logic leaked away. like this video I watched of
a mum absolutely losing it as a baby lisps its very first word… anthwopocene.

or like this time Ann from work gave me a handmade card after my dad died. she had painstakingly cut out & pasted an image of a vaguely azn girl to the

front. I was confused by the racial inaccuracy & touched by the meticulous penmanship & completely unprepared for the revelation that Ann was a devout

Mormon & this was a devout Mormon card & that she had written her devout Mormon email inside so I could begin my devout Mormon journey!!! all I can

say is that some people see pain as a franchising opportunity. I’m thinking about that one Joan Didion quote that people always send you, a single person

is missing for you and the whole world is empty, when someone you love
has died & when you would rather be left the fuck alone. the way the word

missing hisses out into the air from behind clenched teeth & how the missing will stretch on & on into the rest of my life like a blaring Hummer limo with

lights ablaze. I used to think of grief as something to be purged. but now I
feel differently. I feel it multiplying in my cells metabolising in my small

intestine flaking off my scalp pooling in the corners of my eyes. a new haggard body part to add to my ongoing collection of haggard body parts.

last night, I watched a film where the sad protagonist asks his staunch driver
to take him somewhere she likes. they end up at a garbage plant watching

clumps of trash fall from the sky with a strange grace. turning to him, she says… doesn’t it look like snow?