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Available for over a year

By the time I reached the halfway house the owners were dismantling it plank by plank, loading up their trucks with propane kegs, space blankets, beer. They looked at me like I was touched, warned me the melt was on its way but having found the guts to come this far I bought some kit from them to call the thaw myself: an auger to pull corkscrews from the sea-ice, to read stripes, though they told more about our past than any future, a hydrophone to lower through the bore-hole, tune in for signs, an effervescent hiss of bubble swarms, telling creaks of ice-sheets big as countries, ageing into craquelure, pancaking, crash of distant icebergs calving, drum solos of snare shots, pedal thumps, breaks across the toms, cymbals, then something made me drop the mic, lower and lower into narwhal moans, deep belly cramps of shipwrecks, scattering of plosives as skate wings broke from weed and coral coppices. deep belly cramps of shipwrecks, scattering of plosives as skate wings broke from weed and coral coppices. I gave the sounds my full attention as the mic came to rest in the silts and clays with its ear pressed against the three-thousand mile hum of a fibre optic cable - the sum of our utterance - impossible to parse, but nonetheless a crazy kind of unison, at least a witness to our longing to be listened to, even if our words do drown each other out. All this in some wind-battered shanty city, soon to be washed up on distant rocks. It’s just the cold and me out here, beguiled by sound, waiting for the trapdoor to fall open.