I wrote this poem in the summer of 2023. I am now in midst of dismantling and re-writing it, many times over. It’s the seed of my next book but won’t be included in it. I’m glad for it to live here, in its initial state.
Excess Deaths
A human-sized fly trap, like the sticky spiral kind that you hang from the ceiling.
The world’s most complicated laser meets the world’s smoothest mirror.
There’s two things I’ve been conditioned to believe
1. that there’s nothing I can do about the world
2. that I can control my life
One-third of the month devoted to anger.
***
The other day, we came upon a memorial to the Great Famine in Ireland.
It took the form of a hill, planted with grasses and shrubs, some wildflowers, and scattered with stones.
We looked at it quietly.
Then, walking around it, we were surprised to find that the back of the hill was a modernist grey wall, embedded with back-lit facts.
The facts were about hunger and famines from all over the world, and had the appearance of
being randomly placed, like a fact about “India’s wheat production” next to a fact about “North American consumption.”
The randomness was intended to point out the connectedness of the facts.
The memorial demonstrated that the random yet connected facts are the underlying structure for the lone grassy hill.
The term “excess deaths” means that more people have died than usual.
Statistically, a certain percentage of the world’s population dies every day.
And now more people than usual are dying.
***
The artificial hill of the famine memorial looked a bit like the set from
Teletubbies, or the Windows XP desktop.
Uniformly round, bright-green hills like this always mean former garbage
dump.
The world of Wall-E but instead of trash, it’s facts!
Towers and canyons of rusty, sticky facts.
Infinite, indistinguishable city of brown squished facts.
What used to be individual unique facts have become, over time and use
and abandonment, all the same.
Wall-E lives alone here.
He methodically stacks the facts.
***
The world’s most complicated laser meets the world’s smoothest mirror
i.e. how microchips are produced.
The proliferation of anti-racist reading groups in the summer of 2020
and their subsequent demise.
The Poo-themed cafe trend started in Taiwan and quickly spread around
the world.
In the memorial of my life, the underlying, stupid facts.
***
The summer of 2020 led directly to a reality TV show where “diverse” chefs get the “opportunity of their lives,” a.k.a. the chance to win $300,000, which is probably close to how much the host gets paid for starring in three episodes of the show.
The host says stuff like “This is what makes us human.”
From this show I learned about a thing called “Pancake Cake.”
So angry about The Big Brunch for no good reason.
Rational people who pursue wealth for their own self-interest.
People are self-interested economic agents.
***
Recently people have been killed for being hungry.
They are represented as being scary, or angry, or environmentally
unfriendly.
Recently people have been killed for being excessive.
Devotional activity:
burn a newspaper
then mix the ashes into some water or milk
and drink.
Is anger without reason bitterness?
Or is anger with infinite, indistinguishable reasons, bitterness?
***
In 2026 there’s gonna be a new scary Pixar movie, about a creature that’s
camouflaged perfectly in its environment.
It perfectly mimics its environment.
The creature and the environment cannot be differentiated.
Every frame of the movie is exactly the same.
You can’t see what’s happening.
It’s gonna be the scariest movie ever made.
Amy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. She is the author of Property Journal (Book Works, 2024); Baby Book (Brick Books, 2023), a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards in Poetry; and Looty Goes to Heaven (Eastside Projects, 2022). From 2006–2020, she was part of the performance art duo Life of a Craphead. She was born in Hong Kong and currently lives in Lenapehoking / Brooklyn.
