The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

by Franny Choi

Apocalypse in the textbook’s selective silences.

By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already ended.

Where did the way lead when it led nowhere? —Paul Celan

Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.

Am I greedy for comfort if I ask you not to kill my friends—if

We were science fiction before science, or fiction.

I’m afraid of being afraid; I’m the world’s worst mother.

and into the fray came I, highly allergic, quick to cry, and armed with fat fists of need. I broke everything I touched.

though it was too late for the earth to yield anything but more corpses.

and I’m out on the blacktop, praying to no one, so no one prays back.

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

I’m stuffed, I couldn’t possibly have more hope. I haven’t finished mourning the last tyrant yet. I haven’t said enough goodbyes to—oh, what was her name? 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. Good morning, what’s done is done is.

Grief’s a heavy planet,

Dystopia of house plants gone yellow and headless;

Dystopia too sad to shower;

Dystopia of back in prison but at least they’ll get clean;

Dystopia of falling out of love with God;

Dystopia of houseless people and boarded-up houses on the same city block;

Dystopia of solitary confinement as an ans...

Dystopia of cages; dystopia of forgettin...

Dystopia bail out the coal plants if you...

Dystopia of billionaires racing gi...

Dystopia $800 a month but the debt st...

Dystopia very lonely on Mo...

Dystopia bone-tired after hours at home;

Dystopia can’t read a book without thinking about the trees;

Dystopia can’t talk about it without panicking;

Dystopia of garbled logic spun and spun in the head;

Dystopia congratulations you were right to be paranoid;

Dystopia of diversity trainings; Dystopia of the banning of d...

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...

Dystopia fill out this form if yo...

Dystopia of the city council hearing Thank you for your comment;

Dystopia in the Senate hearing Not to my knowledge I was not aware;

Dystopia press your thumb here to access your memories;

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;

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.

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

I keep dreaming about showing up late to my own funeral, everyone tapping their feet as I climb into the casket—

I’m okay, say the ventriloquized pixels of my mother. 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.

The problem with using a word like “mourning” in reference to the future. As when a mother in a movie says to her gay son, “You’re dead to me.” She mistakes glow for a grave, but there he is, red constellation of coals. Here’s something I can say about us: we’re not dead, not yet. (Not anymore.) : : :

Is it possible to experience anticipatory feelings toward the past?

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.

you speed on ahead, earth forbid, I’ll know. I knew.

comfort woman comfort woman when I read it bottle woman balm woman shhh woman

bit of living proof amid the war woman it’s hard these days but at least there’s this woman