^{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.

Two years into anorexia recovery, 
when I begin to miss dying more than ever, 
my cat begins to hide. 
She disappears for hours and I find her 
hammocked in the lining of my couch. 
She has hollowed it out with her teeth 
and stares at me through cobwebbed eyes. 

I am startled at my own anger. 
After all the time and love I’ve given her, 
I can’t forgive her turning away like this. 
My partner reminds me that cats 
do not know how to be cruel, 
but they do know survival and fear. 
Each day, I reach into the dark 
mouth of the couch and pull her, 
claws and all, back into life. 

Weeks later, she dies with no one home. 
I discover the body and the urge to blame 
myself glows hot in my chest. 
How could I let her die 
in an empty house? 
How could I be so cruel. 

On the drive to donate her body, 
my partner apologizes with every breath. 
We pull over and he cries into my coat, 
How could I let this happen? 
And I know that if he feels guilty too, 
maybe the blame belongs to neither of us. 

This is the person who tried 
to breathe life back into the cat’s corpse, 
without realizing what he was doing. 
He did it because his instincts told him to, 
because every cell in his body is good. 
For weeks, the memory will make him 
shiver, gag, rinse the moment from his mouth. 

This is the person who gave everything 
to keep me alive, when letting me die 
was the easiest thing to do. 
He never stopped looking for me 
when I hid in the hollows of myself and my heart 
became a shadowy hallway of locked doors. 

This is the person who, if I died 
as the doctor said I would, 
would surely blame himself, 
and I would bang my phantom fists 
against the plexiglass of the living world, 
screaming No! 

I did not die. 
And when I was stuck in the hospital, 
sobbing as I pictured him living our life alone, 
I wrote him a letter asking how 
he could ever forgive me. 
He wrote back saying I would 
rather miss you for a while 
than miss you forever. 

In the car now, he asks how 
we’ll ever survive this 
and I say Together. 

as a child, i learned
while killing, do not think about being killed.

            when you are five, you will watch your father,
            while skinning a deer, rip the hide from the muscle
            like pulling apart the velcro on your pink light-up sneakers
            after you get home from your first day of kindergarten.

as a child, i learned
the right body can be resurrected to walk on water.

            it is the summer after second grade and
            insects you will never learn the name of float on top of the river,
            and you watch as they glide and you hold your breath.

            just trust the water, they said.
            trust you will float, and you will float.

            you were always a child that sank.

as a child, i learned
when a rabbit dies, it will scream so loud
you will think of this death-sound with every other death after.
even the quiet ones, as if this loudness could out-wail death,
as if there is no other option but to break open the air
with your grief the same way your father cracked apart the
deer’s ribs to pull its heart out.

            you have never eaten another animal’s heart,
            but you watch your father cut the bottom third off with a pocket knife
            and skewer it along a stick he finds by the edge of the woods.

            when it emerges, gleaming and slick from the smoke of the fire,
            dripping with grease and blood-fat,
            you smell this heart-third
            and even though you can still see your father’s hands
            red and pulped and trembling
            as he pulls out the center of this creature,
            you can’t help but notice your mouth water.

now, you think of which parts of yourself
you will slice off to make a meal from,
how you can rip your girlhood off you
with nothing but the right pair of hands,
which parts you could snap the blood vessels from,
easy as pulling out a weed,
all your good blood shaken loose like so much dirt.

            so consider this a window,
            consider the surgeon a precise and humble butcher,
            who fills the future with your own blood,
            which is, after all,
            the only water you’ve ever found safe enough to trust,
to close your eyes in,
and float.

^{Lynchburg, VA. Summer 2022}

They sing as they walk n’ when they walk they dance. The Blueblack women. 
They whisper bout me, up North, this green don’t exist. I don’t know 

who I was before I was a campus, maybe a forest, maybe another people’s
mother. They don’t care bout what was made of me. The Blueblack women

they grin, huff something bout the sun, the devil’s hot ass breath on their napes. 
Ask me who is you? I paint dusk the orange of their blueblack fingertips, 

that dye on their lips. That’s a pretty name ooo. I don’t see folks like them much.
When they walk about the daylight, curl up in my grass blades, groan

Damn! these hills is hilling today! It’s the sweetest curse of my name, women 
who come from flatlands, buildings that bleed no natural light. Blueblack

women greet me in the morning bluer than they were last night. They dress
in red, ripe plums. I watch them chase each other, blueblack between the pillars, 

no fear they’ll lose sight of the other. They near campfires n’ don’t burn. 
One bluer woman, smilin’ like a bunny-moon says I’ve never seen a mountain.

If I could, she’d wake up with me outside her window, glowing blue.
She’d scale my shoulder with her bare hands. I don’t know who 

I was before, maybe some ground, some unknown lists of murders.
But these blue, blue women are giggling in the green of me.

I can’t give you my eye,
nor a kidney, nor a second

right now. We have to hustle
up the block like antelopes
cus all the buses are

colonists. All the signs
are chandeliers, light

stuck in shambles.
I’m eating earth-

worms watching
neighbors become stars,

Grannies becoming idols, parents
become strangers. Our childhoods
were sundials. Adulthood sundered & stabbed

for the Sabbath. Our nations are out,
our capitals are overrun with word-rot.

I’m photographing the apocalypse
while watching history through the mouth

of a shield. I’m from conifers
peeling potpourri for the arrivals

needing helipads. Summon oblivion & still
I give my heart to the panthers
to the Palestinians cracking open

a skull-warm winter, screaming back we’re all the I
in nation—even when we’re scheduled to die.

I’m not brave because I leave gently. It’s not mercy

when the kill lives serving self. I told my therapist

I’m through with villain portraiture but I keep leaving promises

to wilt. Even this is vanity—garden of self-importance. I’m rambling.

What I mean to say: Love is larger than declaration. & chrysanthemum

don’t thrive in starless night. Who am I to light the sky? I know, no one

loves to end any more than we live to die, but I’m learning not to clutch

the ground so fierce. To trust life is a series of orbits;

worship mercy in routine. I know this part like lost love:

gripping sheets, curling toes, tongue feels righteous but don’t fill

empty space. All hollow goings. Carving fresh cavities to become

known. Nimble fingers, sigh & sweat. Fill me full

of hope. After, glow

again fading.

Back to wilting,

gentle kill.

You up?