The Death Spiral

The death spiral is a courtship ritual among raptors. Locking talons in mid-air, they cartwheel toward earth, risking death until determining when (or if) to let go. If they survive the stunt, they validate the fitness of their potential mate. If not, the test can end in a fatal collision with the earth. Think of it as the ultimate first date. Written during the years of the Trump era, The Death Spiral is a conceit for our fraught political times and the sense of precarity that the poet experienced as a queer woman married to an immigrant. Like the eagles in their precarious death dance, we are mutually dependent upon one another, entangled, and yet survival in this age, the Anthropocene, may be a practice of letting go, learning a position to one another that is less rapacious. The Death Spiral is part-love letter, part-death notice to the earth and its creatures.