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.
