A Lullaby Made From Ice

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  • Published 20220503
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-74-0
  • Extent: 264pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

The closest I’ve ever come to an iceberg is at the bottom of a dime bag. Me, a climate of catastrophe, aching for the melt. Apply barrel butt to crush chemical into sliver and shard. Soak, watch landscape become liquid. There were nights when I was so far spun that room wouldn’t stop spinning and, for comfort, I would play the sound of Antarctica’s icebergs succumbing to the heat. Scree and sheets tearing apart. The melody epic in the magnitude of one form embracing another to become. Salt song, undoing. One time, in the throes of psychosis, as this serenade filled the room, I imagined my extremities populated by penguins. An itch of flippers. Cacophony of beaked throng. Gay couples hatching eggs. The pull into an imagined micro: my body became lynchpin of a southern pole. Huge heaving hull, frozen. Teeth the mass beneath, grinding. Eons in the space of unravelling. I believed myself fluent in flightless tongue. When I came down, my body was a puddle in the middle of a wrecked mattress. Below the ice is the rubble of rock, clinging to what it once was.

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About the author

Scott-Patrick Mitchell

Scott-Patrick Mitchell is a Boorloo based non-binary poet who was the recipient of the 2022 Red Room Poetry Fellowship. They are completing a Westerly...

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