Is death a thing that can repeat,
recur—happen again?
Or is each death unlike before?
Unlike and never same?

Are we bound universal by death?
Is death something we share?
I think perhaps that death is not
a seam that all shall wear.

This is not to say that some won’t die,
they will—but the twining
thread that stitches body and word
in corpus, the twinning

of a human is so singular
that when it comes undone,
when it becomes a corpse—
death the word is too dumb

and universal in noun and name.
All shall die. But death?
There is no such thing. A person
that ceases to have breath—

they have died. But there is no death.
Every death is singular—
unequivocal in the loss
of one in particular.

There is no death, only the dying.
There is only someone’s
death—a dispossession possessed
by a person undone.

This poem was originally published on Nichola's Substack.

Nichola Kowald is an Australian writer, a 25-year-old teenage girl by the means of HRT, a Catholic sojourner who lacks a communal body because that body does not recognise her womanhood. Displaced, she writes her corpus in verse and prose, in the raiment of feminine textile, hoping to spin the Fates’ distaff upon the acerose pen of spindle—to write of that bodily weave.