Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

Excited to see the latest issue of the great Exterminating Angel Press. I’m also happy to be included with so many other excellent writers. Check out my poem, “As the Obituary Section Gets Bigger”. The theme of their spring issue is “Imperfect World Order” and my poem is a meditation on how COVID has changed…everything, including how we read obituaries. Along with some nostalgia, politics, and obligatory ’70s references. Share the love and support our awesome independent literary journals!

As the Obituary Section Gets Bigger

Remember when you’d read the obituaries and it was a decision,
meaning you had to go and find that specific section of the paper?

You didn’t do that? Me neither, but bear with me, I’m making
a point. That news—the news—was easier to ignore in an analog

era, when we picked and chose what sources we let inform us,
nuggets of insight like the toys in cereal boxes, crammed in between

colorful ads, some of them promoting unhealthy activities endorsed
by athletes and actors, and the types of unbelievable faces fabricated

in a laboratory called Hollywood. The thing is, not much has changed,
but now everyone can make news and the rest of us have no choice

except to navigate through this stream, each of us alone in boats being
drawn irresistibly away from the reality we once depended on, the way

our ancestors, in ancient times, knew if they sang the appropriate songs
and made sacrifices in necessary numbers, The Sun would welcome each

new day, celestial clockwork scientists were burned for construing, their
non-obituaries an official statement that said Don’t do this, or You know

all you need to know; the world already too full of noise and knowledge
for anyone to contend with, and the one thing—the only thing—we knew

was that all of us would be gone sooner than we’d like, wherever it was(n’t)
we were headed—after—and it was entirely up to the ages to observe, if it cared

to commemorate lives lost like revenue in outmoded business models. Which
brings us back to obituaries and how we keep an account in this disconnected age,

where everything is right there in front of us, in real time, news that’s impossible
to contend with, even as some of us die trying. And when you scroll down the page—

looking for anything but insight (not everything is fit to print, and who prints anything
anymore?): updates on the new faces being manufactured, bought and sold as proof

of progress; sports scores, or what the latest sort-of scientists have to say about however
the moon is moving the tides during your birth month—it’s all but impossible to avoid

that list of famous names who did enough to earn precious digital inches in the public
record, and in these uncertain times where we know exactly what we can count on

and, worse, what’s coming down the runway: an unregulated plane with faulty parts
taking out everything in its path (but please know it’s not personal; this is just business

as usual). Thus, it’s difficult to deny an acknowledgment, the way popes finally stopped
pretending a flat earth revolved around the sun; if more newsworthy names are added

to the daily toll, it means many more than we can bear are piling up behind the scenes,
like pieces of dead trees used to crucify the prophets—those who dared to understand

the types of cause and effect not explained by the stars or the sun or our gods, or even
those with the power to legislate which casualties get cataloged for the public record.

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