Notes from the Everyday

I see the decapitated head of a baby in the morning 
on my news feed. It has been raining incessantly this 
day, week, year, and all the lakes in the city are 
overflowing. I am told to follow my dreams on the 
weekend, and on the weekdays, I work through my 
bleeding skin to pay the taxes on time. I buy authentic 
silver jewellery and hide it behind the clothes in my 
cupboard for the promised doomsday. I plan to barter 
my bad deeds with the silver, I intend to go to hell. I go 
in to work where people are now being called 
resources, no one asks any questions except why 
you’re never enough and what’s for tea? I place a mug 
with a motivational artwork on my desk — it is gathering 
dry trash during the day and wondering, at night, what 
happened to its potential? When I bring out the 
laundry, a musty smell resides in my t-shirt, and I have 
forgotten the liminal promises — that water has 
memory; our dreams hide inside the space where two 
worlds meet; if you plant something and wait, a miracle 
emerges — I am distracted by a country that parades 
the 4th horseman of the apocalypse as a spectacle but
the baby’s head without its body comes up on my 
news feed again, until it is replaced by parents holding 
a beheaded body of their child, weeping. We schedule time 
in the calendar to get wet in these rains, but one day,
like every day, G-d reneges on the promises She made 
to humankind, and takes the rainfall away. I sift through 
poetry newsletters in my inbox, decide which to keep 
and which to send to old friends. My body gives up little 
by little, fear doesn’t form fully inside me. I don’t stay 
awake at night or shiver. I stand in the window, peek at 
the clouds on the hill, drink chamomile tea to write 
about all this in a letter I will not finish and send to no one.