Enmesh
every death diminishes you
Imagine the woodland floor, littered with dead leaves and moist earth, teeming with little creatures, life predicated on death, surviving in hollows. Break me down into base parts, proteins and carbons and atoms, the stuff of stars transported through everything and into nothing.
simultaneously infinite and microscopic
When even the trees are fighting and fucking. When even the light is one mass in a universe of open flames. When even the shirt on your back has a long memory of faltering hands and clacking machines and the open field.
isolation is death
We are enmeshed in complex ways with one another: with a man on the other side of the world, hand on his gun, in front of the hungry desperation of his country’s poor; with the nurse at the hospital three miles east, skin blistering under a mask, carrying dread under her breast as she faces the tide; with the dog howling as his owner’s body is led away, another number added to the growing tally.
echoes in empty streets
They have started to build a memorial out of words and pain. Grief finds a channel, carves a road. (Every word I write brushes up against it, still unable to comprehend the breadth and depth of this shadow.)
another legacy to break our children’s backs
Our family scatters to four corners yet never forgets.
love is love is all
Christine Fojas is a Filipino-Canadian hailing from Las Piñas City and currently living in Metro Vancouver. She has a BA in Comparative Literature from University of the Philippines and works as a library technician at Douglas College. A list of her publications can be found at her website. She is also on Twitter as @chrisfojas.
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