January 2025
As the Mills River Fire substation burned, I was thinking about Terrance McKenna
describing the dangers of DMT as death by astonishment. And thinking about Donald J. Trump
becoming president again, and remembering how the boundary dissolving of marriage
left my heart in its hospice bed with the morphine drip, left the trauma survivor speechless,
trapped in the slow flashback. Our final extinction by bewilderment and shame and loss,
less like passing on than by bringing down an inexplicable flood of sociopathic landslides,
until after the hurricane event, proud generations of mountain folk live in winter encampments,
waiting for the insurance check that never comes, rounded up and sent back to nowhere
that exists on the other side of a barbed wire fence. Now the utilities are offline,
bridges crushed. We remain under the weight of old growth. The spiritual place of our ancestors
glimpsed a new reality for a few seconds, until the trip ended, after we took our vows,
after those last conversations uprooted everything, and left us with a divorce decree,
taking history with it until even the main roads are impassable. We hold to the last hope
of a farm store that might have propane for the hotplate and ice for the cooler.