A MEMORY

my picture of the apocalypse was perhaps unimaginative
and extraordinary. foreseen solar flare? sure. listen, worlds
end every day. uncountable amounts of destruction
since the first page. little deaths, too, too small to even tally.
loss webs between all moments, everywhere a space
where something once lived. here’s my real worry:
i find myself at the brink of being’s quiet crystalline
stream, the estuary emptying into the pool of all things
and non-things, and the synapses won’t want to quit,
and my mouth will still be wet with bubbling atoms,
and i won’t be able to bring myself to kneel in the clay.
i’ve done so little living. how could there possibly be someday
more to lose? lie to me. tell me that in some faraway
future history of humanity, someone like me notices
this attempt at goodness, any of our exploits, any of those
golden hours where we had everything and nothing hurt—
is it too much to hope to be reanimated in the brain,
the tendril wrapped around a cortex? but there’s a whole
rolling world for my myth to attend, and on one of those
indigo nights, there will bound an unusually playful
star, or a ripple of air otherwise headed home which jerks
like a peal of laughter to the sea, or a raindrop which takes
the shape of a hummingbird, or a second hand of a clock
which halts in place for an imperceptible instant
and bends a little at the elbow, suddenly remembering.

NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The epigraph by Ada Limón comes from the poem “After You Toss Around the Ashes” from her collection Bright Dead Things.

“i want you to look at the moon” was written only using words and phrases from quotes by Apollo astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Alan Bean, Gene Cernan, James Irwin, Edgar Mitchell, and Alan Shepard.

“impact” references Charles Fort’s Super-Sargasso Sea, the fictional dimension where lost things go.

The title of “this too shall devastate” comes from the adage “this too shall pass.”

My endless thanks goes to my readers, whose unwavering support and patience is directly responsible for this book being able to exist at all. Thank you for being here, whether it’s again or for the first time.

I’m so grateful for all of my teachers, but I need to especially thank Nathan Singleton and Kathy Zagar, who nurtured my love for words and demystified my goals at a time where just one wrong look probably could have sent me reeling. They will never not be present in what I write and I will owe them forever.

The biggest of kudos to editor Rhiannon McGavin for her invaluable insight and expertise, and for knowing what I meant even when I didn’t quite. Thank you for making every poem better.

Thank you to my agents Richard Pike, Matthew Harvey, and Allison Howard for your support and for continuously making impossible things happen.

Thank you to Agnes Cecile, who very kindly allowed her art to be used on the cover—I couldn’t have dreamt of something better suited.