Embedded Files
Breaking Bad News – A Structured Approach
Neolithic mortuary rituals involved a meticulous choreography of movements, sounds, and objects designed to create a sense of order and meaning out of the chaos of death.—Richard Schein, ‘The Landscape of Death: Rituals of Sovereignty in Early Medieval England’ (2006)
*
You walk into a room, remembering chest infections, prescription reviews, six-week postnatal checks. Another sits in a room, expecting. A newspaper, open at the horoscopes, invites your eye. Gemini, Leo.
You walk into a room to hear the news. You put a hand to your hair, as if your hair might obstruct the news.
The other offers a glass of water. A box of tissues on the table, primed within your reach. The other says Would you like to have a friend or family member with you?
The other sits in a chair and looks at a screen. The news exists between the screen and the other’s face; you can’t yet see it. Three sit in a room: you, the other, the news.
Well-drilled, the other delivers a warning shot: Unfortunately, the results were not what we hoped. The other speaks the news, using signposting, appropriate pauses, and questions to check understanding. You nod.
Driving home, you roll down your windows and the news thins out.
You wake that night, the news beside you.
Grading
People “thought” the landscape through their own emplaced and palatial bodies. The landscape to them was a kind of body, a body imbued with spirit powers. —Christopher Tilley, Interpreting Landscapes, Geologies, Topographies, Identities; Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology (2016)
*
tissue sliver
smeared on glass
magnifies to meaning
flesh, like land, keeps silent
until it’s read
on a bad line
in a strange tongue
they speak your body to you
months’ gestation
black blood black soil
coiled a stranger
to light mother
know me
pinhead – poppyseed –
september fruit –
you fed it blood
it fattened
Visiting Hours
What we see as ‘the dead’ in long barrows and chambered tombs may not have been clearly distinguishable from ‘the living’ and it was quite possible for people to move from one state to another at different points in time. —Anwen Cooper et al, Grave Goods: Objects and Death in Later Prehistoric Britain (2021)
*
In the barrow’s dark, she sits beside you, pulling at a thread on her hospital gown.
You never asked what she was in for. When they wheeled you down to theatre, she said good luck from the opposite bed. She smiled when they brought you back: Well, it’s all done now.
Morning drug round, your discharge day – she stood up, gasped, fell back. A nurse ran to her. An alarm sounded. They ran with trolleys, pulled the curtain round.
They counted compressions in hurried voices. More access please … rhythm check … adrenaline ready for the next round … any output?
After fifteen minutes, a decision was made. They filed out, taking trolley and equipment with them. Her daughter, blear-eyed, steered to the Quiet Room for tea and tissues.
Behind the curtain, nurses performed their ministrations. They removed oxygen mask, cannulas, catheter. They washed her face and smoothed her hair.
Beside you, still – her face, wan crescent, in the tail of your eye. She pulls on a thread. If they didn’t make these gowns so flimsy.
The Real World
In our sensorial engagement with the world we meet it, flesh to flesh. — Christopher Tilley, The Materiality of Stone (2004).
*
remember when Neo finally woke up
in the gloop bath wrenched
the tube from his throat
for the first time breathed
remember when the tube hung free
mucus-slick you whispered it’s alright
it’s alright we’re all here
as if he was and felt
your grip you can’t recall
if Morpheus ever said he’d have to mourn
for the illusions always last
to die as outside
the real-world sky
past the Nebuchadnezzar’s window
flashed pathetic fallacy
Peter Surkov is finalising a first collection, exploring death and the body, from Neolithic barrow tombs to modern hospital wards. His poems have appeared in magazines including The Rialto, Stand, Magma, and Poetry Review Salzburg. He works as a doctor in London.
Copyright © 2026 by Peter Surkov, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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