With others in your absence by Zosia Kuczyńska

“Joe and I are drinking too much Spanish lager in a bar in West Bridgford. It’s been eleven months: right now, I can no more elegise my dad than I could have called him ‘father’, and anyway, ‘dad’ sounds flat, like it belongs in that blunt universe in which the dead can’t be addressed as lyric people.

Joe reminds me that an elegy is something that you write when you’ve resolved your grief. I feel like an apple that’s fallen from a tree into a bed of roses in winter, skewered like a severed head upon a thorny stem, which is to say I am far from resolution.”

– from ‘2017’, in With others in your absence.