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I KNEW A WOMAN
after Lauren Berlant
The inheritance of someone else’s story —
elevating ordinariness, therein flourishes
the female complaint. Eager intimacy 
fishes through the day’s gander-gossip
in downy captioned letters. A fixation in need
of facebook fill-in. I realise how much longer
we have to like this love 
we future-feather as common. Nested
spheres of experience cameo fielding 
into the inevitable patternknit 
of nuclear familiars. Forms of duration 
we breathe in, screen lives, strung happiness 
on endless branching display. 
It’s not the tragedies
that kill us. Glazed counterpublics
replicate trimmingly into modular  
easy-set parts. Better lives all round.
You always were embedded in soft machinery.  
The collective call out to the daily blue.
Individuals on record, time-sharing the fantasy. 
That’s how it begins: ‘Every normal female
yearns to be a luminous person.’