Dispatch from the Future (8 page)

what it was like before we were. We can

relate to our past selves: dull like mercury,

alluvial soil, just after the earthquake.

It’s hard to know which disaster to expect, yet

no one ever thinks, I don’t want to do anything

except sleep forever maybe. Yes, in the future

we are prepared for what we cannot prepare

for. We are sparkly for a reason, our country

depends on us for a kind of warning entertainment.

In the future we never make pilgrimages to disaster

sites, we lay flowers on the brows of the living.

Thank you to the editors of the following journals, in which some of these poems first appeared:
Absent, Bat City Review, Can We Have Our Ball Back?, Catch Up, Diagram, h-ngm-n, horseless review, InDigest Magazine, Jellyroll, LIT, Low Rent, MiPOesias, No Tell Motel, Nöo Journal, Ocho, OH NO, Sixth Finch, Softblow
, and
Washington Square
.

Many poems also appeared in these chapbooks:
How to Mend a Broken Heart with Vengeance
(Dancing Girl Press),
Summer in Paris
(Mondo Bummer), and
The Future Comes to Those who Wait
(Grey Book Press).

The poem that begins “In the future, you live in Switzerland,” takes much of its content from a letter Elizabeth Hildreth’s five-year-old daughter wrote to their Swiss foreign exchange student, Julia.

The poem that begins “In the future, we pay our debts with blood,” is dedicated with love to Lily Ladewig.

The title “I’ve Written All Over This in Hopes You Can Read It” came to me in an email from Nate Pritts.

“Epistolaphobia” is a word Edna St. Vincent Millay invented to describe the feeling of being unable to write letters.