Annika Durum

Grief is a place

 

I’m the howling torrent of the Virgin River
after a good snow year,
my blood is the red in the red rock,
these mountains are made of my bones.
Sometimes you know a place,
Sometimes a place is you
or whatever the earth needs you to be,
slithering in the sand with all sorts of creatures.
The gila, the coyote, the crow.
I’ve undone myself in every way of undoing.
Molted, shed, spent a season in hibernation, brumation.
Still the self persists, though I don’t know why.
How am I here, how am I “I” when so many others are lost.
We didn’t ask for this, you know.
The self, the spirit, the keeping on.
How many heartaches, breaks, obliterations,
how much loss, destruction, defeat?
I understand decay is part of nature,
that rot is a necessary season,
but how much must I give to the dirt
before I can dig my bones a shallower grave
& finally let them rest?

 

 

Annika Durum is a Southern Utah-based writer and visual artist whose debut chapbook, Rotting Season (forthcoming 2026), won Quillkeepers Press' Fall 2026 Poetry Chapbook Competition. Her creative work is optimistically feral, sun-bleached, and lives somewhere between beauty and rot. She's queer, chronically ill, and cohabitates with her husband, a herd of deeply opinionated cats, and some spiders. Find her in the canyons or at annikadurum.com.