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Kyle Hemmings uses the contrast between organic (with the full richness of its definitions) and plastic, living and dead, part and whole to accentuate the sense of absence and longing in Another Day Without Lin. 

Cranberries, no longer living, but taken from the still-living bush suggest the blood of the lost beloved who could not survive the loss of even watery blood. This blood itself is spoken of as divided into plasma and water, suggesting medical procedures but also providing a parallel to the separation felt by the poem’s speaker.

Bone marrow is spoken of as if it were a whole being and sentient. Fish, which should be whole organisms are “stirring beneath the naval”. Nothing is as it should be; Lin is gone.

The persimmons, organic (containing carbon, part of a living thing, and presumably grown without pesticides) are particularly rich in such contrasts. The speaker feels a pulse as though they were still alive, or still part of a living thing; the yearning for Lin is displaced in a yearning to feel life where it is not. This then leads the speaker to image “the threat of neo-plastic shadows”. I am uncertain what it means but, to me, it suggests hospitals.

This leads to a more pleasant dream, “[l]ow tide and in remission” but to hide from the tensions of opposites and the pain of loss requires the sequestration of the self in an inadequate box. Splinters of reality always intrude. This leads to a desperate and powerful promise, a strong despairing conclusion to a poem of loss and grief.

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