Anyone who has not yet come to terms with death, she said,
Raise your hand.
We all relaxed, sure of if nothing else the fear of our friends
but we should have known better: these questions are never so kind
and suddenly we all were death, all of us:
being death was a condition, suddenly, of our coming to terms with it
and our hands, as an unsurprising consequence, were dead
which meant that we were holding our corpsey limbs in the air
which were flailing everywhere and decaying openly for all to see
with all sorts crawling eagerly up our bodies to feast
on what were hands and now are meat.
This made it harder to relax.
Katherine Parsons is a PhD student at the University of Birmingham, where she specialises in conceptions of memory in contemporary literature. Her debut pamphlet, ‘Little Intimacy,’ won Frosted Fire’s ‘New Voices’ Award and was published in Autumn 2022.