The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

by Franny Choi

Apocalypse in the textbook’s selective silences.

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.

Human History, a front parlor infinitely painted over with massacre, 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.

have last year’s ashes in my throat, stories stuffed so full of morals they bleed sugar.

The good news is that things will go back to the way they were, which is also the bad news.

And whose country was I standing on, the last time we survived?

Come in to the thunder, to any sound that’ll shake me from doom’s haze.

I hold each stolen face against my forehead as the centuries slough off, flightless.

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, and green.

Dystopia to stop remembering one’s memories; Dystopia to keep remembering one’s memories;

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.

This year, someone else’s father

despite the pictures, which know only how to tell one truth at a time.

The bad memories in the body? They climb to the surface,

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