Grief Freezes in -30 °C
It’s -30°C, and the hood on your car won’t close.
You freeze your fingers against the metal,
slamming it shut the way you were taught,
by someone you only see in pictures now.
You’re charging it—
but you can’t remember
if it’s always been this stubborn.
You can’t remember
if it was supposed to close before.
You can’t remember
what he told you,
how his voice sounded,
how his smile curved at the edges,
how his hand felt on your head—
proud, of course, but
but but but—
you can’t remember.
All you know is it won’t close now,
and you worry yourself sick over it.
If you were back two, three years ago,
you would’ve called your dad.
He would’ve picked up,
no matter the time,
to soothe your worries.
Now your septum freezes to your face,
two, three years older,
and the only way you can talk to him
is by looking up at the moon
and forgetting to remember.
Calypso Haine is a queer, transsexual, mixed nehiyaw and white poet currently living in amiskwaciywâskahikan. Their poetry explores themes of body and gender, nature, and community. For Calypso, art serves as a means of preserving emotions and people in a way that can be shared within a community. Their piece reflects on grief, focusing on the simultaneous processes of remembering and forgetting. Calypso explores the fear of forgetting a loved one after they’ve passed—forgetting their voice, appearance, or the things they once shared. The poem is rooted in Calypso’s own experience, years after their father’s death. After moving away from the place where they grew up with him, certain memories began to fade and were rewritten in the process. The remnants of their father became fractured, and the challenge of holding on to him through pictures only deepened this sense of loss. Though the spirit remembers, the mind struggles to keep up. Art, for Calypso, becomes a way to process and immortalize these feelings.