Something old must die

from The Goodness of Things

In a radio newsroom in 2020 my mouth was a hangover and it tasted like pennies and my skin was sticky with all that was trying to release from me. A keyboard

and letters and swirls filling every corner of a lined page, how I loved the chaos of the virus even when everybody else seemed afraid. The clicking of keyboards

and the words pressing upward on screens from the wire: death, it spreads. borders closing and cities shutting down.

I remember two nights before at Daniel’s apartment, when the sun dropped pink and golden in the face of an adjacent building. He was in a chair with a glass of whiskey and said he didn’t think things would ever be the same again.

And in that warm and strange emptiness of a city with no people, I saw a seagull’s body stretched out on the street, a crow perched on top of it, ripping meat out from the open chest cavity.

One month later in a recovery centre a Cree woman taught me how to pray, how to bow my head and bend my knee towards and into an unbearable weight.

She told me to sit in the darkness for long enough that I could find just a pinhole of light and I remember when I told her about the birds she said it was an omen, that in order for something new to live, something old must die.