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.

Headline: the unthinkable’s already, already happened again—and so Layleen’s perfect face swings back into the orbit of my grief— Catch up—it’s the anniversary of the aftermath of another bad massacre, and I’ve got plenty of seats.

What am I supposed to do? Be afraid?

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 answer to any any;

Dystopia I have read the terms and conditions; Dystopia everything I eat is touched with money; dystopia everything I am is touched; Dystopia press your thumb here to access your memories;

my first love of losing myself in the scaffolds and percussives of an unparsed lyric doomed me for life to never be able to hear, actually hear, the words to any songs, 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 those harbors are built, mostly, of sonics— not gibberish, I mean, but language so sacred it’s not my place to try to decipher it, phonemes holy as stones on a string, mysterious as the names we give to animals, or words we know only in prayer—at

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

Who Died and Made You American In the afterlife of apocalypse, my people, too, are settlers of a theft. Pay me like a man whose ancestors burned down the homes of Pequot children. Deserve, deserve, what a sad little word. I’m an upstanding citizen of a country far from earned.

We were punished and salt-licked and wrecked with wanting we didn’t understand. We were old enough to be obsessed with death—to dream of baseball bats and crushed skulls, to tongue scripture and lift our wetness toward extinction.

Somewhere in a prior world, a woman with my face is scraping the seeds from an unborn hell. All night, doom rang from the sky. And in the morning, there are mouths to feed. There are crocks in the cellar and the ruined crops, the early frost, the neighbor’s red daughter strung up in the square. What else to do when the unspeakable comes.

Listen: I have a bad imagination. Dystopia is the word for what’s already happened so many times, it’s the reason ________’s so cheap. No such thing as an undetonated hell; the pilot light clicks, and I eat.

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

In lieu of proximity to firefighters; in lieu of the ability to speak the airless language of ghosts; or to reverse the logic of molecules; or to force Exxon to call the hurricane by its rightful name; or to convince my friends not to launch themselves from the rooftops of every false promise made by every rotten idol; 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 catches me, and I stay there. Suspended against the unrelenting orange. I stay there splayed, and dying. And shocking the siren sky.

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, Argentina at the top, Greenland kissing its toes; it was a metaphor, someone explained, for seeing things another way—so yes, if it is true that another killer cop’s killed another Black child’s father, another “unauthorized” choke- hold, another no charge again, if once more riot gear again budget once again gas station, more flames, more who’s to blame gets blamed again 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.

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.

I dream of things that are larger than life I can walk the streets at any time of the day am I the colonization or the reparations? I,

Things That Already Go Past Borders trade deals; pathogens; specific passports; particular skill sets; vegetables; car parts; streaming rights; seasonal workers; some insects; certain birds; religion; dialect; music at the right volume; headlights; human remains; wireless signals; all manner of money; of memory; people in trucks; on trains; on foot; in line, in lines; charging checkpoints; wading waist deep through rivers; clinging to rafts; or yawning their way through customs; sisters separated for decades, whose faces are as foreign to each other as the faces of the dead; seeds; drones; prisoners on planes; dictators in motorcades; orders to kill; and longing; yes, this most of all; the longing of families; and the long -ing of storms

Great-Great-Grandmother, I’m writing to you under chartreuse skies, after the Great Verticality, and after the Multiwars and their Various Rebrandings, and after Tipping Points #1–379, and after, finally, the Very Long, Very Slow Dispersal of Things.

There are crises every day, and there’s also bread bubbling on the counter, pickled beans, a cat who comes home. 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.

Dear Great-Great-Grandsomeone, Under a graphless sky, I’m writing to say: thank you for healing what you could; for passing down what you couldn’t.

What you gave me isn’t wisdom, and I have no wisdom in return, just handfuls of lifestock: Every day, a sky is. Miles are. We sing, entangled, and the root-world answers, and together we’re making. Something of it. Something of all those questions you left.

Today, I woke up on still-stolen land, then scrolled through the latest debris of people attempting godliness in a hundred wrong ways. The room was filled today with light; filled, you could say, with nothing.

I’m not good enough to survive not being good.

You don’t have to believe in something for it to startle you awake.

You only knew him for two years! cries the mother of the boy we lost—sweet bedraggled flourish of a boy who was hers and hers and hers and briefly mine and then— out—like a swath of river, over a cliff and gone,

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