Antarctica – by Andrew Sutherland

RUNNER-UP IN THE GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2022


I was thinking about Antarctica
how even in the last landmass labelled great unknown
            there are stations // there are borders

how covid was on six continents of the world
and then in late 2020, people on the Chilean station tested positive
            and suddenly // it was on seven

how on the other side // the Arctic // scalping world
there are supposed to be these ancient viruses in the permafrost
             and that’s melting // and they’re melting

                         ready to return to us, unchanged

so I wanted to go to Antarctica
I’d take all my medications
find my way on some research vessel
and in the centre of an endless sheet of ice // make

        the tiniest // safest cut
and freeze the HIV in my blood down in that great mass
how I would persist // beyond myself
although I suppose that would only melt, too
        the way things are going

                                          I guess I want to remain somewhere
make a mirror // diseases thawing // older than dinosaur hearts

                                                                                 of course I won’t do it.
                                                                        I think it’s probably a crime.
                                                                                bio-hazard // viral body
                                                                out of the body // down in the ice

         and who can afford to go to Antarctica anyway // in this climate

once // after a surgery // I nearly bled out
and it seemed quite funny to me at the time
          that even when most of the blood is gone
the amount of HIV presumably stays the same?

how it all just replicates a little further
                                  and then you’re full again

I was reading about some human trials
             for a functional cure
             it’s a cut // at the cellular level
and then it’s neutralised
the virus is effectively gone

             I know it’s monumental
but I felt // for a second // this selfish kind of unease
which is maybe hard to explain // if you’re not Poz
                            or, I don’t know, if you’re not me

but I was afraid // for a second // that I wouldn’t know myself

for the tiniest // safest moment
          I felt a kind of melting  
          at the thought of a cure

                      that I wouldn’t ever recognise myself again

like how Antarctica used to be rainforest
in some supergreenhouse era // a temperate
tangle of vines // at the bottom of the earth
how it could be again // they say
        the way things are going
 
        and I thought, if that happens
that functional cut // that vanishing act
there could still be a part // a trace
                        Antarctica. before I come to melt

               is this a very colonial impulse?
to want to freeze // where you shouldn’t
see deeper inside yourself // beneath
the borders of your body // where you shouldn’t

                      I just wanted to remember myself

and in my southernmost, be liquid // melting
                   like the wicked witch of the west
if the wicked witch were a virus on the seventh continent

and all the penguins there // dead friends of Dorothy
and the children’s children of my blood
              will wander with the heat // the trees

Image: Kyle Mortara


This poem appeared in Island 164 in 2022. Order a print issue here.

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Andrew Sutherland

Andrew Sutherland (he/they) is a Queer Poz (PLHIV) writer and performance-maker between Boorloo (Perth) and Singapore. Publication credits include Westerly, Cordite, Overland, Running Dog, and EXHALE: an anthology of Queer voices from Singapore (Math Paper Press). His debut collection, Paradise (point of transmission) was published by Fremantle Press in 2022.

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