The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

by Franny Choi

There was the apocalypse of pipelines legislating their way through sacred water,

Before the apocalypse, the apocalypse of bees. The apocalypse of buses. Border fence apocalypse. Coat hanger apocalypse.

the apocalypse remembered, our dear, beloved apocalypse—it drifted slowly from the trees all around us, so loud we finally stopped hearing it.

Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe. Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in. I want an excuse to change my life.

And every year I find out what they’ve done to us, I shed another skin. I get closer to open air, true north. Lord,

Meanwhile, I’m merely gorging on the butterfly effects of ashes, ashes; reaching for the oat milk while, hundreds of feet below, a chalk line marks the moment we were all doomed. We were done for. We were science fiction before science, or fiction. One billion judgment days later, I’m alive and ashamed of my purchases; I’m afraid of being afraid; I’m the world’s worst mother.

I muttered curses to keep the deep fakes away, studied the stars for signs of the worlds to come, though they were already here—the extinctions and feudal lords, the dirty blankets, the dissidents tied to stakes or hung from branches, the price gouge, death camp, flood, bombs of liberty, bomb and bomb and bomb already dropped, already having made me from its dust, already broken and paid for and straddling my crown.

I know I should want to be torn open by the failures of hope, but here’s what I want: a tight circle around everyone I love; a stove that doesn’t burn.

I have no condition but this: ill-timed optimism; a disturbing tendency toward pleasure; also, bad at reading

For example, is this a hopeful poem, or a hopeless one? If I write, there’s nothing to be done, it’s a bird in the hand, i.e., worth its weight in dead bird. It’s so corny to call for the tyrant’s head again, and yet.

The good news is that things will go back to the way they were, which is also the bad news.

No, thank you, I’m stuffed, I couldn’t possibly have more hope.

And hers? How many Wes did they cut out of me? And whose country was I standing on, the last time we survived?

As a child, I couldn’t believe my luck: born in the best country on Earth. Now I know better. So what.

a man killed three Korean mothers just like mine. Her voice echoes, heavy, into the tunnel between us: What am I supposed to do? Be afraid? What am I supposed to do? In the tunnel between us, her voice echoes, heavy just like mine.

Dystopia to be flattened or flared at a memory’s notice; at a hair; otherwise, to drift numb and dreaming through the so-called day; Dystopia isn’t there something else besides; there must be; some sequence that ends in anything but a cold loop; there must be an elsewhere on the else side of the scrim; an opposite word but not that one; please; not sticky with sap; not synthetic sugar and cruel; what’s the other opposite world; if we knew its name could we call it; if we called it would it come;

and I’m thinking, too, about how this, my first love of losing myself in the scaffolds and percussives of an unparsed lyric doomed me for life to never be able to hear, actually hear, the words to any songs, even in English, even my favorites, like Jamila’s, which I put on when I’m adrift and sunken and just need to feel at home in something—even those harbors are built, mostly, of sonics— not gibberish, I mean, but language so sacred it’s not my place to try to decipher it, phonemes holy as stones on a string, mysterious as the names we give to animals, or words we know only in prayer—at Rebecca’s mother’s funeral, for example, where, when invited, I added my small voice to the reciting of the Kaddish, and the perfect thunder of it lifted one part of me higher than air, while rooting another deep into the fragrant earth, a bit of which I later scooped, as gently as I could bear, onto the casket, the shovel heavier than any word I knew, and more full of light than even the birds overhead, who, as we wept, kept, of course, right on saying exactly whatever they needed to say.

You were good. You lasted. And at last you were—I mean, you had been. You will had been. I will have missed your is. Do you know that? Will you have / known that?

On the phone, I ask my mother about a memory. Am I mourning that right, I want to know. “Just pretend it didn’t happen. I just say, it didn’t happen,” she says. It happened. Am I saying that right? What happened? Did it happened?

Q: Is it possible to experience anticipatory feelings toward the past? A: A whole, gaping, pulsing as I run toward it, though it’s the running that pushes it away. In other words, the event is horizonal; an event horizon mothering itself.

I retraced my steps, then retraced the retracing. What could I have done? I’ll say it every night before the day slips into rot: What could I have done?

They’ll say: What was it like to have so many people on Earth at once? They won’t say that, but I’ll answer anyway: It was very busy. There was always something to avoid.

If you speed on ahead, earth forbid, I’ll know. I knew. I dreamt of you stoneless, once. I know, still. That it was you. Somehow, I’ll knew.

how to speak to any one in a history like this. how to tell you.

Sliced from bone, my life hung like a jaw—faultless. And unforgivable.

If the land in me could speak to the land I live on, what would it say? Maybe I’m sorry. Or, where does it hurt?

Shame. I’ve failed again and again, in any tongue, to free us.

Bayonet of this: American me, fathering nothing but the wails of strangers I’ll never caress. Bayonet of dispersal, gas. We run, choking on the sound of century and century’s return. I run, and a country breaks its way out of me, then breaks, breaks.

O, my badly loved grandmothers, I kin you to me, facelessly. I wrap all our deaths around my shoulders like a fox pelt coat: grandmother across oceans and ages, grandmother across the border, grandmother carried off by soldiers, grandmother carried into endless highway by disease or dog or dawn’s unrelenting purge. I wrap until I’m made of grandmother, until the ritual musk of their dreams is sprouting from my skull: sandalwood, ambergris, copper of blood, coin copper, clay of approaching dusk.

You can come back up again. Run, and the sky will catch you in its thousand orange hands. You’ll never land.

When disaster comes, some of us will stand on the rooftop to address the ghosts. Some of us will hold the line. Some will look for the shards, run our tongues along the floor.

In lieu of a proper translation for my grief, I say, green green green, until it cools enough to lower myself into. : : : Holding my love’s face in my hands, I tell him I miss him. I say, I miss you like I miss the trees.

Land that won’t love us back, of thee, of thee. To be loved without reason is the dreamsong of grace.

So tonight, reaching up to hold hands with these leaves stretching onto the back steps, I say: Please. Let this spell grow legs. Let my sisters’ names grow long as their hair. Long as they need to. Let their names rattle the night air with their incessant lungs. Let the sounds of their names burn blue in the night, let even their ugliest memories be named after the daughters of prophets, please, if there is a god named for the humble undersides of these leaves somehow not yet dead, let the names of my sisters make all the doors on my street fly open. Let every tree sleeping in our chests claw awake. And rush out to answer that call.

I dream of things that are larger than life I can walk the streets at any time of the day am I the colonization or the reparations? I, too, make the decision. I carry it with me connect the dots in our real lives ginger roots cross mountains we will not live quietly I choose to be the reparations

a laugh that spread the way a fever spreads, like the opposite of death— just the earth, with its thousand mouths, singing: I will. I will.

whose faces are as foreign to each other as the faces of the dead; seeds; drones; prisoners on planes; dictators in motorcades; orders to kill; and longing; yes, this most of all; the longing of families; and the long -ing of storms

Some rituals I do to imagine what you knew about freedom: move my fingers over glass, swipe like a question; swallow a bullet and stay silent until it passes; touch my lips to silicone, sand, silicone, sand; walk into the ocean and let the waves kick me over, then dry in the sun and lick the salt from my forearms; sit facing a friend and hold our palms together without touching; take turns completing the phrase, It could have been that . . . ; draw my face from memory; ask a friend to bind me with rope until I can’t move, tense up until I cry; then laugh until the ties loosen; until everything loosens;

We sing, entangled, and the root-world answers, and together we’re making. Something of it. Something of all those questions you left.

Imagine, I can’t stop saying. Imagine, I beg, when I should have said, Look: paradise is both a particle and a wave. You don’t have to believe in something for it to startle you awake.

Meanwhile—well, you know. Meanwhile. All our kin is dying at a distance. The coast’s been burning for weeks. Filling the kettle, you catch me humming, The dream that you dream will come true, and we laugh, though nothing’s funny but this: We knew the end was coming here. We knew it, and like idiots—like perfect idiots—we stayed.

I look at your face and there, I feel it—my life rushing toward me from both directions, twin rivers reversed and crashing backwards into their source. You were improbable as that— your eyes flicking open a seam in the dark, improbable— us, laughing at the same time with both our heads on the same pink pillow, improbable—in the same city—both our hearts still going—What are the chances, I murmur when I reach out and touch your brow, How is this possible—

I imagine decades with your head between my palms and feel only terror at the loss—I’m here—O him—I have wasted my life—

For six years he held my world in his hands. What happened between us is a silence, and silence is all that happened after. Let’s just say I walked away as if I deserved my own years. Let’s say it, and be clear—I deserve nothing.

Scrambled by need, I say, I want to give you my bones, all my language rendered useless at your feet. I’m useless, here, too—I thrust my uselessness at you.

Yes, I squandered years in houses promised to ruin. There were particular futures I could not bear, though they rushed toward my keening, fogbell mouth.

And in the swath between them, loneliness. Just that: loneliness. I thought that was all love could give me. I’m sorry. I thought I’d seen the future. I thought I knew the words to our one wild and unfathomable life. Forgive me; I see it now. I wasted so much time being wrong.