Dead calf on the farm today. With livestock, there’s dead stock, as my husband says. Born premature this morning, it is a wet, wee thing. While its corpse was being expelled into the sombre light of this world, I was dreaming of Rini. We hadn’t spoken in 3 years, aside from a brief email exchange when her dear father died from cancer. In the dream, we were friendly again, sitting in a small dark room, lit by a crystal that glowed in the centre. Kathy Acker made maps of her dreams, diagrams of spaces and animals and human faces, connected by text describing a feeling, or action. Perhaps I should make a similar map of the mental ruins of my past and present.

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