March 11th, 2011 - Gra[c]e Gardiner

or, TWO DAYS BEFORE THE WINTER SOLSTICE 2020, I SAID GOODBYE TO MY CHILDHOOD DOG OVER ZOOM

This morning I don’t know

what I’m even mourning.

The withered lab-pit mix

named for the stars and moon

and a children’s-book bat

who lost then found family

everywhere. The jagged

ruby-clot of cells I passed

sudden a couple weeks

back to the watershed

or landfill, contingent

to the steps of my local

wastewater treatment plant.

My mood of clouded mirror

its extinguished, endless,

eviscerating lack.

A year or two or ten

of sublimated grief.

A decade ago, I was

seventeen in a schoolroom

vaguebooking pop songs,

sink-or-swimming in all

the wrong christian rules

and academic creeds,

corroding my body’s tender

plume of gender for sex,

achingly oblivious

piously repressed

and everyone I’ve lost

was still alive, somewhere

in the future-past of not yet.

Dear teenage-complicity—

Dear un-diary— Dear

one-day-slinks-to-the-next—

I have a headache

the size of a quarter

million obituaries

hurtling exponentially,

a colicky unease

as rampant as the mask-less

as swollen, bitter-rawed

as the gaslit every time

I leave my ramshackle

domestic. I live in

the smallest magnifications

of worry, fury, sadness,

scraping thru each day minute-

by-minute. Ultimately, I am scared

I am foolish in my hurt

-harbouring. Even to say why

or how runs on empty.

What can be left

when trauma tangs the air

in persistent erosion. I try,

I am trying to parent

in the radical, unlegal

etymology: to origin

-ate and affect an account

-able stake in this world

I will not shake: to care

for my place. I write out

this unordinary ordinary

because it happened

because it is happening

because no one should be let

to forget or doubt or undo it.

Least of all a future self.

Least of all a current me.

---

Gra[c]e Gardiner is a non-binary poet and burgeoning intermedia installation artist. Find them online at pearlsthatwere.tumblr.com. They encourage you to become a monthly sustainer to the Race Matters, Friends Community Bail Fund, or to find your local bail fund in the National Bail Fund Network's directory.