try calling it hibernation.
Imagine the darkness is a cave
in which you will be nurtured
by doing absolutely nothing.
Hibernating animals don’t even dream.
It’s okay if you can’t imagine
Spring. Sleep through the alarm
of the world. Name your hopelessness
a quiet hollow, a place you go
to heal, a den you dug,
Sweetheart, instead
of a grave.

^{(for Maje Adams)}

When given the opportunity to connect with  
No  
To be welcomed back into your  
Home  
No  
Family? 
Do you take it? 
// 
You reached out your hand and I took it. It felt too good —I pull away almost immediately 
I look behind me seeing the ash of my life I burned  
and I begin to cry 
Through the tears I see you next to me  
Still here  
Still—
Here  
Tears tear through my body and we sit down on the bench. You hold me close  
Rest here as long as you need, im here and im not leaving, but you need me to promise that you
will not go back. You made it too far
Everything in my body says to turn back to the life I knew.  
I look deep into your eyes, and my voice shakes as I whisper ok, I promise  
You do not let go as I watch the life I thought I knew disappear before my eyes.

^{after Gwendolyn Brooks}

My wild grief didn’t know where to end.
Everywhere I looked: a field alive and unburied.
Whole swaths of green swallowed the light.
All around me, the field was growing. I grew out
My hair in every direction. Let the sun freckle my face.
Even in the greenest depths, I crouched
Towards the light. That summer, everything grew
So alive and so alone. A world hushed in green.
Wildest grief grew inside out.

I crawled to the field’s edge, bruises blooming
In every crevice of my palms.
I didn’t know I’d reached a shoreline till I felt it
There: A salt wind lifted
The hair from my neck.
At the edge of every green lies an ocean.
When I saw that blue, I knew then:
This world will end.

Grief is not the only geography I know.
Every wound closes. Repair comes with sweetness,
Come spring. Every empire will fall:
I must believe this. I felt it
Somewhere in the field: my ancestors
Murmuring Go home, go home—soon, soon.
No country wants me back anymore and I’m okay.

If grief is love with nowhere to go, then
Oh, I’ve loved so immensely.
That summer, everything I touched
Was green. All bruises will fade
From green and blue to skin.
Let me grow through this green
And not drown in it.
Let me be lawless and beloved,
Ungovernable and unafraid.
Let me be brave enough to live here.
Let me be precise in my actions.
Let me feel hurt.
I know I can heal.
Let me try again—again and again.

          ^{We are preparing for the wrong disaster. —Chris Begley, The Next Apocalypse}

The year I was born, the Soviet Union’s  
early warning radar system malfunctioned,  
reporting five intercontinental ballistic  
missiles in flight: a preemptive nuclear  
strike. You may have heard this story.  

How a single lieutenant colonel dismissed  
the signal as the false alarm that it was …  
but had he made a different call  
in that moment? Had he seen those five  
ghost fingers as a fist? A mushroom cloud:  

the most dangerous cliché. I hold it
in my hands on my fortieth birthday and  
it becomes a bouquet: a thousand stems  
leading to a thousand worlds in which cooler  
heads did not prevail, to a thousand  

alternate universe versions of me, born  
in the year of the apocalypse. I see myself …  
dead via radiation poisoning. Dead via  
the shutdown of the supply chain, the failure  
of the water system, the reemergence  

of previously preventable diseases. Dead  
in such manly ways: via an unlucky fall  
in a fistfight over nothing. Via a scratch,  
ignored and infected. I plucked petals, looking  
for a version of me who survives. Hoping  

to find that … you know: leather jacket,  
black motorcycle, katana strapped to my back  
version. That warrior poet, lone vessel of  
vengeance, keeping the wasteland’s unending 
tide of razor-clawed mutants at bay version.  

All these dead worlds, and he isn’t out there. 
All these visions of who I could have been, 
and not a single hero: folk, super, anti 
or otherwise. In one life, I wore a suit of armor 
and drowned in the river. In one life, I hoarded  

food and choked on it. In one life, the basement 
was so full of boxes of bullets—a tornado came 
and I had nowhere to go. No shelter. I emptied 
clip after clip into the wind. All these dead 
worlds, and we tell the same stories.  

Which is not to say that I never survive. Just 
that my survival, in every reality where it is 
possible, never belongs to me. I see myself: 
forty. Not a dual-wielding bandit warlord. Just a
neighbor, sitting in another endless community  

meeting. And how many of our ancestors have
already taught us: even after the world ends, 
there is work to do. I see myself in that work: not 
the leader, not a lone wolf, just another part of the
pack. Because in every universe in which  

I am alive, it is because of other people. And I 
don’t always like them, but I love them. In every 
universe in which I am alive, it is less because I 
could fight, and more because I could  
forgive. Because I could cooperate. Because  

I could apologize. Because I could dance. Because 
I could grow pumpkins in my backyard and leave 
them at my neighbor’s door, asking for nothing in
return. In every universe in which I am alive, I am
holding: a first aid kit, a solar panel, a sleeping

cat. Never a rusty battle ax or rocket launcher—
sure, maybe sometimes a chainsaw, but only for 
firewood. I am holding: a cooking pot, a teddy bear, 
a photo album, a basketball, a bouquet of flowers.
Survival is not a fortress. It is a garden. 

Survival is not a siren. It is a symphony. And
yeah, we fight for it sometimes, but survival is not
the fight. It is the healing after: the soft hum of
someone you trust applying the bandage, the
feeling of falling asleep in a safe place.

i’m confident that the absolute dregs of possibility for this society,
the sugary coffee mound at the bottom of this cup,
our last best hope that when our little bit of assigned plasma implodes 
it won’t go down as a green mark in the cosmic ledger,
lies in the moment when you say hello to a bus driver 
and they say it back—

when someone holds the door open for you 
and you do a little jog to meet them where they are—

walking my dog, i used to see this older man 
and whenever I said good morning, 
he replied ‘GREAT morning’—

in fact, all the creative ways our people greet each other
may be the icing on this flaming trash cake hurtling through the ether. 

when the clerk says how are you 
and i say ‘i’m blessed and highly favored’ 

i mean my toes have met sand, and wiggled in it, a lot. 
i mean i have laughed until i choked and a friend slapped my back.
i mean my niece wrote me a note: ‘you are so smart + intellajet’

i mean when we do go careening into the sun, 

i’ll miss crossing guards ushering the grown folks too, like ducklings 
and the lifeguards at the community pool and
men who yelled out the window that they’d fix the dent in my car, 
right now! it’d just take a second—

and actually everyone who tried to keep me alive, keep me afloat, 
and if not unblemished, suitably repaired.

but I won’t feel too sad about it,
becoming a star 

Imagine, when a human dies,
the soul misses the body, actually grieves
the loss of its hands and all
they could hold. Misses the throat closing shy
reading out loud on the first day of school.
Imagine the soul misses the stubbed toe,
the loose tooth, the funny bone. The soul still asks, Why
does the funny bone do that? It’s just weird.
Imagine the soul misses the thirsty garden cheeks
watered by grief. Misses how the body could sleep
through a dream. What else can sleep through a dream?
What else can laugh? What else can wrinkle
the smile’s autograph? Imagine the soul misses each falling
eyelash waiting to be a wish. Misses the wrist
screaming away the blade. The soul misses the lisp,
the stutter, the limp. The soul misses the holy bruise
blue from that army of blood rushing to the wound’s side.
When a human dies, the soul searches the universe
for something blushing, something shaking
in the cold, something that scars, sweeps
the universe for patience worn thin,
the last nerve fighting for its life, the voice box
aching to be heard. The soul misses the way
the body would hold another body and not be two bodies
but one pleading god doubled in grace.
The soul misses how the mind told the body,
You have fallen from grace. And the body said,
Erase every scripture that doesn’t have a pulse.
There isn’t a single page in the bible that can wince,
that can clumsy, that can freckle, that can hunger.
Imagine the soul misses hunger, emptiness,
rage, the fist that was never taught to curl—curled,
the teeth that were never taught to clench—clenched,
the body that was never taught to make love—made love
like a hungry ghost digging its way out of the grave.
The soul misses the unforever of old age, the skin
that no longer fits. The soul misses every single day
the body was sick, the now it forced, the here
it built from the fever. Fever is how the body prays,
how it burns and begs for another average day.
The soul misses the legs creaking
up the stairs, misses the fear that climbed
up the vocal cords to curse the wheelchair.
The soul misses what the body could not let go—
what else could hold on that tightly to everything?
What else could see hear the chain of a swingset
and fall to its knees? What else could touch
a screen door and taste lemonade?
What else could come back from a war
and not come back? But still try to live? Still try
to lullaby? When a human dies the soul moves
through the universe trying to describe how a body trembles
when it’s lost, softens when it’s safe, how a wound would heal
given nothing but time. Do you understand? Nothing in space can
imagine it. No comet, no nebula, no ray of light
can fathom the landscape of awe, the heat of shame.
The fingertips pulling the first gray hair
and throwing it away. I can’t imagine it,
the stars say. Tell us again about goosebumps.
Tell us again about pain.

the unholy trinity of suburban late-night salvation
barring seemingly endless options of worship

bean burrito breadsticks and mashed potatoes
or a soft taco pan pizza and a buttered biscuit

an unimaginable combination of food flavors
for people not ready to go home to their parents

and yet none of the options feel quite right
so maybe I should call it Self-Portrait as idling

in a drive-thru with your friends crammed
across the sunken bench seats avoiding

the glow of the check engine light with black tape
pressed with a precision unseen anywhere else

in their lives as a fractured voice says don’t worry
take your time and order whenever you’re ready

from behind a menu backlit like the window
inside of a confessional booth as the hands

of the driver open up like a collection basket
for the wadded-up bills and loose change

that slowly stack up as the years go by
and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be

in this analogy but I know about masking
warning signs and hearing out of tune

voices scream WE’RE THE KIDS WHO FEEL
LIKE DEAD ENDS so instead I’ll call it Self-

Portrait as From Under the Cork Tree
or maybe even Self-Portrait as whatever

album people listen to when they love
their friends and still want to feel connected

to the grass walls of a teenage wasteland
that they can’t help but run away from

^{O, let them be…
    Gerard Manley Hopkins}

In high school the biggest dare was to slink 
over the slick rocks flanking Cumberland Falls, 
where the wide but shallow river dives 
seventy feet into a deep pool of froth.
There, people say, catfish big as men twist 
and slither, awaiting suppers sped
their way. You can see a rainbow at night, 
shimmering on the mist during a full
moon and a clear sky. This is true. I snuck
behind the green curtain once with my best
friend, whose name I won’t say because he
never came out. Just as we reached the veil
of water where we would disappear
into another world, I slipped. My right
leg slid down the cold boulder and before
I could plunge into the churning chaos
where torrent met river, he grabbed hold
of my hand. I was so electrified
by his touch I didn’t think of how close
I was to being swept away.
Instead I thought how a small moment
of ecstasy is akin to drowning.
He held on for a beat longer
than necessary. The roar behind
the falls was a deafening symphony heard
only by those brave enough
to penetrate this darksome cavern
carved by centuries. Fern-laden, alive
with the smell of moss. A secret cathedral
made of wildness and wet. We were mesmerized,
and stood watching the cascade as if frozen
yet, as if we might see through to the other side.

i stand before you to say 
that today i walked home
& caught the light through
the fence & it was so golden
i wanted to cry & i lifted 
my right hand to say thank
you god for the sun thank 
you god for a chain link fence
& all the shoes that fit into
the chain link fence so that
we might get lifted god thank
you & i just wanted to dance
& it feels good to have food
in your belly & it feels good
to be home even when home
is the space between metal
shapes & still we are golden
& a man who wore the walk
of hard grounds & lost days
came toward me in the street
& said ‘girl what a beautiful 
day’ & i said yes, testify
& i walked on & from some
place a horn rose, an organ,
a voice, a chorus, here to tell
you that we are not dead
we are not dead we are not
dead we are not dead we are
not dead we are not dead 
we are not dead we are not
dead 
yet

^{(after Stephen Hawking)}

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money—

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.   Remember?
There was no   Nature.    No
 them.   No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up   to what we were
—when we were ocean    and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all—nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All   everything   home