More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
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.
Where did the way lead when it led nowhere? —Paul Celan
Look up
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.
My sister calls, and it’s already too late for things to be better.
If I’m king of anything, it’s being late. Omw, I type, though I’m still huddled in last year’s mistakes.
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;
It’s so corny to call for the tyrant’s head again, and yet.
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. Good morning, what’s done is done is.
Her voice echoes, heavy, into the tunnel between us: What am I supposed to do? Be afraid? What am I supposed to do?
Dystopia congratulations you were right to be paranoid;
Dystopia of diversity trainings; Dystopia of the banning of diversity trainings;
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
Look up
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.
I don’t believe her. I’ve skipped too far ahead. A few dozen years, and it won’t be true. A hundred, and I’ll never know I knew.
I sit on the train toward Chicago and mourn the avocado softening in my kitchen. This, too, is practice, avocado being the smallest unit of grief. It’s rock and ripe and gone; rock and ripe and gone. Which should be a lesson. Instead, of course, the fruit is another imagination that passes through me on its way to unknowing.
I smashed the fruit against the bowl and called it “salvage.” 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.
say it with me: it won’t be okay and we can follow the burning shore. there’s nothing more to say. no next time but the broken before.
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
Deserve, deserve, what a sad little word. I’m an upstanding citizen of a country far from earned. I’m a child of immigrants, of strategic importance, of imports from one immolation to another.
If the land in me could speak to the land I live on, what would it say?
I’ve failed again and again, in any tongue, to free us.
How can I explain the things and things and things I did wrong? I was never any good at telling the difference between what wanted me and what wanted me gone.
Upon Learning That Some Korean War Refugees Used Partially Detonated Napalm Canisters as Cooking Fuel
Every day of my life has been something other than my last. Every day, an extinction misfires, and I put it to work.
No such thing as an undetonated hell; the pilot light clicks, and I eat.
I’m distance-skinned. No one can put a story inside me but me. If not even my memories love me enough to stay, then fine, cut off the hands that keep me married to any history. See?
Sometimes I wonder how long I’d have to run to reach the last generation where one of us felt loved, and I crumple into carcass.
I’m a short lie of a woman whom men have wanted to tear apart with their good strong hands. I mean, same.
If I love anyone enough to know they deserve better than me, and stay anyway, then: What?
O, I’ve been hard to love in America. I’ve been slow to speak in America. I’ve been, undoubtedly, an American and done practically nothing to stop it.
What’s the German word for preemptively missing something so much you can’t look at it. Literal translation: green green green and I hide my face.
If only it’d been a ghost that had shattered the glass. Some simple anger—some old fable we could soothe back to sleep with a few choice words and a handful of incense. Much worse that it was the heat. Much worse: the way molecules bend to the fact of it, and break.
growing in the yard. Do I have to run through the list? The firefighter prisoners—my friends’ islands slowly swallowed—war in my faucet, remember? Syrian Civil War is the name of a drought. The name of this hurricane is Exxon, Exxon, I shout. I can pull as many weeds as I want. I stalk the garden pulling them, thirsty for the sound of their true names wrenching out of the soil. (Do I have to say it? They fly out of my arms.)
if again and again it is the same—then it holds that the opposite must also be true: the so-called opposite world of food drop-off stations, of phone trees, of bailouts and carry an extra mask, the world of kneeling for a stranger’s gift of milk to flush the tear gas, the world of saying a thing in unison so clear it drills a hole through to the other side of what’s possible, so clear and wholly inverted, we realize it’s been here all along: O kingdom of fire, O kingdom of food, with the same mouth we take your blessings; with the same mouth we pronounce you come.
Land that won’t love us back, of thee, of thee.
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
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
Everything was happening, and you were alive. You were alive then. What did you do?
Today, I woke up on still-stolen land, then scrolled through the latest debris of people attempting godliness in a hundred wrong ways.
I’m not good enough to survive not being good. I’m like you—still drooling after a perfect world, even as the stars warble off-key and the oceans rattle with plastics.
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.
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
