It was the year of fog 

the jagged cogwheels of the

world sputtered and 

spat out 

curses 

and sputum 

time became a yawning 

wound, infecting 

and reinfecting 

thoroughfares began to 

echo 

​

My room, like many rooms

became a tomb for all 

my shedded selves, 

like snakeskins crunching under

my feet, 

little parts of me that 

the fog ate away 

​

I think of geologic timescales. 

​

All this we hold dear, the 

obscene, the anthropocene—palm

oil plantations, our advances

in neurosurgery, proxy wars, 

childbirth and surrogacy— all

condensed into inch thick sheets of

sediment and shale 

​

Outside my window, 

The year of fog, the ghost 

year, 

dissipates slowly, corrosive

It smells of rot 

smells of loneliness, 

if loneliness could ever 

have a smell, but 

the earth did not shiver,

did not spin off its own axis 

​

Maybe in some future age, 

when the seas recede and cleave open

the salted, bone-white gullets of our

cities 

Maybe some alien pincer 

would come to know of 

this age of plastic and plasticine

would bellow and guffaw 

at the year of fog