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.