The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

by Franny Choi

I was born from an apocalypse and have come to tell you what I know—which is that the apocalypse began when Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor.

By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already ended. It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending world spun in its place. It ended, and we woke up and ordered Greek coffees, drew the hot liquid through our teeth, as everywhere, the apocalypse rumbled, 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.

Meanwhile, I’m merely gorging on the butterfly effects of ashes, ashes; reaching for the oat milk

Celebrate Good Times

Dystopia I liked the old dystopia better; Dystopia paying money for water; Dystopia $2.13 an hour before tips; meanwhile billionaires in space; Dystopia sixty hours a week in a pandemic;

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;

We Used Our Words We Used What Words We Had

I Have Bad News and Bad News, Which Do You Want First

Try not to time travel, says the voice in my meditation app, as I fast-forward to everything I haven’t yet remembered to be afraid of—

When did it happen: my whole life rotted into predicting my last

I’m okay, say the ventriloquized pixels of my mother. I don’t believe her.

everyone / you know / someday / will die will was / will used to / will had been what knew / would have / forgotten were to / have known / were to have been / lived

Mother, you taught me a word from from and never toward. 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.

This sense of impending catastrophe is an illusion, however, because the trauma never quite arrives. It never arrives because it has already happened. —Grace M. Cho

Poem in Place of a Poem 우리 family 를 생각해, says my mother, as she begs me not to print my earliest memory of the police. (I’ve written it elsewhere: the cold night. The parking lot. The cop’s jaw stomping out my mother’s pleas. The vulgar clink of cuffs. In the poem, her wail rises like a monument to nothing. In the memory, no grammar I can wave at the cop is enough to keep her safe.) I need the story, I say, to explain. Why I’m writing about this. She ends the call crying. The sound, a hole where a word might go. Here, too, I’ve failed to protect her from my need. From the cops. From mother and the seeds of shame. Shame. I’ve failed again and again, in any tongue, to free us.

Rememory

My grandmother and I were born already lifted out of the picture. We were born from the smell of soldiers trying to make an emptiness where we once stood.

I was never any good at telling the difference between what wanted me and what wanted me gone.

Someday we’ll lie in dirt. With mouths and mushrooms, the earth will accept our apology.

Every day of my life has been something other than my last. Every day, an extinction misfires, and I put it to work.

Sometimes I wonder how long I’d have to run to reach the last generation where one of us felt loved,

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.

I should mention that when my first love died, he was already dead, had already always been on his way to the roof, on his way over its edge. And when he was here, he was here. By this logic, he is and was and is and was. Unrelentingly.

Aaron Says the World Is Upside Down

Imagine a version where Black children, too, can be children, make mistakes, still anticipate grace.

With Mouths and Mushrooms, the Earth Will Accept Our Apology When Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb in 1945, it is said, the first living thing to emerge from the blasted landscape was a matsutake mushroom. —Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World

Things That Already Go Past Borders

What I want you to know is that we’re okay. Hurting but okay. We’re surviving, though it’s true, we don’t know what that means, exactly.

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.

Protest Poem