Because I like science fiction and because world events are the inexpressible horrors they are, apocalypses have been on my mind. The end of the world is a topic that sci-fi and poetry are uniquely well-suited among the arts to address: both are concerned intimately with time, what can be made possible in it, and how the human (and/or posthuman but otherwise recognizably conscious) experience of time could change. These are genres that give language to the possible, the imagined, the remembered and the dreaded. And poems can remind us in their structure that time loops back around, again and again, reframing the same unlearned lessons in new shapes.

Apocalypse thought made me want to revisit the title poem from Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On , a poem that uses the apocalypse as its refrain, giving it a structure of recurrence: “Before the apocalypse, there was…” repeats and repeats, and only in the final stanza do you get “It ended.” And even then:

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. It ended, and we woke up and ordered Greek coffees,
drew the hot liquid through our teeth, as everywhere, the apocalypse rumbled…

The world keeps ending, the “we” goes on; this speculative world hasn’t ended in a way where Greek coffees can no longer be ordered. (Which is a reading directly informed by one of my particular climate apocalypse fears, the extinction of the coffee plant.)

Another recurrence: the poet Sina Queyras revived their Lemon Hound site again and Thoughts on Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid floated to the top of my poetics RSS feeds.

Back in 2017 Sina had written:

The world is too dramatic, too hot, too close, and risk feels even riskier: you haven’t the right stuff, you haven’t the right, period. And yet, as I said, it is never the right time to write. Never the right place. Never the right subject matter. It is about the muscle. The continued witness. The resistance.

As you might guess from the datestamps of the time I last wrote anything here until now, never the right time/place/subject matter certainly resonates for me.

And back in 1940 Virginia Woolf wrote a scene that could’ve been in one of the Expanse novels that I just finished, if you changed the setting from a London flat to a space station and the bomb to a rail gun:

All the searchlights are erect. They point at a spot exactly above this roof. At any moment a bomb may fall on this very room. One, two, three, four, five, six…the seconds pass. The bomb did not fall. But during those seconds of suspense all thinking stopped. All feeling, save one dull dread, ceased. A nail fixed the whole being to one hard board. The emotion of fear and of hate is therefore sterile, unfertile. Directly that fear passes, the mind reaches out and instinctively revives itself by trying to create.

And so why not keep writing into the present moment’s difficulties? The written word keeps ending and the word goes on.

The subject line of this newsletter is taken from a Sleater-Kinney song from their 1999 album The Hot Rock which is also the title of a poem I'm trying to write because I gotta be me and write my poems about adolescent punk rock queerness at the end of the world. If you also have big feelings about the Expanse novels, the oeuvre of Sleater-Kinney, and/or how to keep writing in a painful broken world, you know where to find me (in emails).

Yours, Erin

PS: I am both writing and sending this on Trans Day of Visibility. In this dangerous time for trans folks to exist visibly (yet another apocalyptic cycle repeating), consider buying a trans woman a pizza if you haven't already. It won't save the world but it could make someone's day.