The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

by Franny Choi

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.

reaching for the oat milk while, hundreds of feet below, a chalk line marks the moment we were all doomed.

I learned to take a chicken apart with my hands, to fill in a Scantron, cry on cue. Sixty-six million years after the last great extinction, six to eight business days before the next one, I whispered Speak to a fucking agent into the hold music to trigger the system into connecting me with a “real person.”

What crown? If I’m king of anything, it’s being late. Omw, I type, though I’m still huddled in last year’s mistakes.

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

and I’m thinking, too, about how this, 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

Here’s something I can say about us: we’re not dead, not yet. (Not anymore.)

I sit on the train toward Chicago and mourn the avocado softening in my kitchen. This, too, is practice, avocado being the smallest unit of grief. It’s rock and ripe and gone; rock and ripe and gone. Which should be a lesson.

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.

Sliced from bone, my life hung like a jaw—faultless. And unforgivable.

My grandmother and I were born already lifted out of the picture. We were born from the smell of soldiers trying to make an emptiness where we once stood.

I didn’t know until I did: He put a new word inside me, which rhymed with the word that was already there.

Here, on the other side of what happened, I make nothing happen, nothing, nothing, nothing, flaccid as a gerund.

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.

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.

In Flint I turn on the tap and out comes war wrapped in putrid cellophane. In Detroit I flip the switch and boil war for tea. In Providence I over-war the plants. War runs down my face in the theater’s dark. I wade into a blanket of war and let its waves carry me out, out past the shoreline’s certainty.

In lieu of a proper translation for my grief, I say, green green green, until it cools enough to lower myself into.

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

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.

All our kin is dying at a distance. The coast’s been burning for weeks. Filling the kettle, you catch me humming, The dream that you dream will come true, and we laugh, though nothing’s funny but this: We knew the end was coming here. We knew it, and like idiots—like perfect idiots—we stayed.