The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

by Franny Choi

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.

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

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 cut an onion, and it’s onions all the way down, and that’s a fine reason to cry at the sink on a Monday

What am I supposed to do? In the tunnel between us, her voice echoes, heavy just like mine.

Dystopia of the lost file; Dystopia of the cracked screen;

Dystopia press your thumb here to access your memories; Dystopia to stop remembering one’s memories; Dystopia to keep remembering one’s memories;

Let me tell you this now so you know before you don’t know anything: You were good. You lasted. And at last you were—I mean, you had been. You will had been. I will have missed your is. Do you know that? Will you have / known that?

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

I can’t imagine it: her face. I was born and she was already gone.

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

If a partway bomb; if a half-paused hell; if a killing, failed, can feed; if a death sentence, incomplete; if a horror, flopped; if extinction unlocks its jaw; if what doesn’t kill you makes you; if almost; if never;

if I can almost love the bomb that didn’t burst; then, if a war didn’t end;

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 come from a short line of women who were handed husbands as salvation from rape.

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.

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.

Holding my love’s face in my hands, I tell him I miss him. I say, I miss you like I miss the trees. By this I mean, Look! The trees are here! Everyone’s outside, darling: green in my hands, ghosts in the drywall—everyone’s waiting for us.

The minute I started wanting paradise, it leapt from my belief.

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.