Disasters

It is 5am and
I am squinting into the glare of my phone
making lists of people I know
who are still alive
in the parts of the country that are
on fire or underwater or shot full of holes,
and the islands where we just
left them to die, where my friend waited days
to know whether her family had survived,
And I think of two decades of poetry
where I spoke of natural disasters in metaphor;
The hurricanes in my body,
the fault lines of my heart.
Now I am mostly still, like Lake Michigan in winter,
frozen around the edges like a wound that keeps
trying to heal,
asking into the ether, Are you ok out there?, like a prayer
to the internet gods, scrolling the holy texts of
Facebook Check-Ins and Lists Of Victims
asking Will everything just burn forever
until we are purified, until our sins,
the blood-soaked soil, all of it
is rising in our throats like bile and apologies?
Were the prophets right?
If someday there are no people left, will there be poems?
Will it matter, what happened to the housing market
if there are no houses?
I keep looking at photographs of my friend’s teenage child
holding pieces of her house in her hands
in Texas
where the landlords are still demanding rent for
empty shells on ruined pieces of land
nobody should have owned in the first place.

My cousin is still alive in Vegas. My friend has not turned up.

I am holding you tighter
because once we are separated by thousands of miles
we cannot know what will happen to either of us
in a world the prophets say is ending
and I am always moving
in miles by the thousands
and I know now what it’s like to never see someone again,
To stare into the ghosts of timelines,
over and over those photos of you on the beach in 2008
and those Pinterest experiments, and every meal I laughed at you for Instagramming,
reading comments like they are conversations happening in loops.
This is why I hate Snapchat. When you are gone, it will not hold your ghost for me.

I still read every last exchange,
in at least two of them
I have promised to visit, and I look at those promises
left on read, now
and it’s just my voice
echoing,
ricocheting off the edges of the screen.

We are all immortal now
But when I can’t touch you anymore
I will know.
Now we are teaching ourselves
to get used to it.
I imagine most of us in the mornings
enacting this ritual, clutching phone chargers like rosaries
scrolling through the lists of disasters and
making more lists
and trying to say ‘I love you’ enough times.