Missing Person

by Nicola Healey

‘It wasn’t the kind of loss the world paid attention to.’

– Tove Ditlevsen, The Trouble with Happiness, tr. by Michael Favala Goldman

Because I could not find a place,

I stopped fighting

and let the world swallow me whole.

Some breakdowns are sudden; some

are slow digestions

until you feel more mineral than self.

I was still alive, yes, but not alive,

not in a life; a casualty of anomie.

People don’t object when there is

no outward sign of life-loss.

The dissolution can go on for years

as though you are a missing person

that no one has missed.

You almost forget you ever had substance:

you meet yourself in an acid reflux

of memory, and are appalled.

But there is a freedom in being

so inconsequential. Unobserved, you notice things,

bristling at a frontier of existence:

a rush or trickle of music heard in the blood.

A creature’s mere continuance. A flower’s

indomitable duty. A clear thought in a clear sentence

as though held by a test tube.

So much is shown up

as a shallow sham of prosperity.

But haze only hovers, then vanishes.

And an elastic jaw lurks in the dark.

I am discontinuous – easy prey,

but truer than the cold-blooded world.

Originally published in Elsewhere: A Journal of Place.

NICOLA HEALEY'S poems and essays have appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Hopkins Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Free Bloody Birds and elsewhere. Her first poetry pamphlet, A Newer Wilderness, was published by Dare-Gale Press in 2024 and won the Michael Marks Poetry Award.

Art by Vivien Wu​​​​​​​