The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

by Franny Choi

you who wants comfort, who are you? have you been a comfort too? 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

We live— have to live somewhere.

We’re free, at least, to dream of the fires that made us by splitting the us we almost, some days, remember.

I was so afraid of seeing dead people that I saw them everywhere.

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

Before, I was sweet enough to be let into rooms. Then I was a red flash among the trees.

I wanted to eat the heavy sun which had been promised to me.

Are you my mother, ship ablaze on the horizon? Horizon, are you?

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

Dystopia is the word for what’s already happened

plus the beautiful things people have tried to put inside me, they fall out the bottom.

If not even my memories love me enough to stay, then fine, cut off the hands that keep me married to any history.

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

O, I’ve been hard to love in America.

I’ve been some version of my grandmother making child after child for a loveless man. I’ve been her, and I’ve been the version of her that lives, that lives in an opportune land, that chooses who she loves, that sits by a window writing,

O beasts of fortune, I am loved sweetest by the horrors of blood, by my own, and by ours, O blessed root rot, by ours.

Among a growing list of promises I can’t make my friends: This weight will tether. You can come back up again. The faithfulness of gravity, of morning sounds. If only you’ll stay.

I don’t know how to do it: hold their faces in my hands and tell them what’s waiting. How to teach any of us to follow this song, into what dark.

I cried when I saw the photos of bleached reefs.

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

I tell him I miss him. I say, I miss you like I miss the trees.

Look! The trees are here! Everyone’s outside, darling: green in my hands, ghosts in the drywall—everyone’s waiting for us.

in lieu of all I can’t do or undo; I hold.

The faces of the trees in my hands. I miss them. And miss and miss them.

Until I fly out of grief’s arms, and the sky. Catches me in its thousand orange hands. It ca...

Then I’d sing, ’cause I’d know I’d know how it feels I’d know how it feels to be free. —Nina Simone

Aaron Says the World Is Upside Down and it’s true, the cops are shooting rubber bullets at even the blonde journalists now; the Target is on fire, and the Wells Fargo’s shining face kicked in by white boys with gas masks and hammers trying to jump-start their war—and yet, the upside-down world is also, by definition, the same world, like the map that hung in the hallway of the house where I lived three or four lives ago,

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

no prison for children. No prison for children.

you sure, are you sure,

Let every tree sleeping in our chests claw awake. And rush out to answer that call.

what a superpower to be great-grandmother chanting mantras in a circle of salt

I dream of things that are larger than life

we will not live quietly I choose to be the reparations

made of the unforgivable future, and the unforgivable past, i bloom, bloodless, and ready to feed.

singing: I will. I will.

sisters separated for decades, whose faces are as foreign to each other as the faces of the dead;

and longing; yes, this most of all; the longing of families; and the long -ing of storms

Everything was happening, and you were alive. You were alive then. What did you do?

thank you for healing what you could;

I’m like you—still drooling after a perfect world, even as the stars warble off-key

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.

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—

Where is your son? asks the chatty lady at the counter, and it’s not a bad question, just an impossible one—where is your son where is your son

I’m here—trying to memorize the details, reciting them like a song— little crust in his eye / bit of bristle on his chin / o smell of him / him / him—

On the other end: grief and its endlessly fabulous outfits; feathers for weeks;

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.