The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

by Franny Choi

They are spells, the women I know, and today, a woman sat in front of a panel of men who, I have to try to believe, were too once boys who shivered in the yard, a woman sat and had to say again and again, it happened, it happened, and watch the glass panes of the once- boys’ faces remain unlit and only echoing back, with their short vocabularies, are you sure, are you sure, are you sure. 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.