Dispatch from the Future by Leigh Stein Page A

I’m gonna run
    and run
    until I’m back where I started.
    I’m gonna invert my body, bathe
    my brain in blood.
    This is a devotional.
    Lily, don’t cry.
    This is a devotional.
    Listen to the sun.
    Isn’t there some Eden we can meet in?
    Bring your prayer
    to your third eye.
    In the future, we temper our irreverence
    with beauty. What a stunner, we tell
    our ancestors, retroactively.
    I used to have to try so hard to look
    like I wasn’t trying and now look:
    I’m bending to the altar wall.
    This is a devotional for the living.
    Lily, don’t fear the future.
    I’m in it. We’re here.
     
DISPATCH FROM THE FUTURE
    In the future, we are tender.
    We temper our irreverence
    with intimacy.
    It’s, like, slightly wonderful.
    We pronounce magic
    like we’re from Michigan,
    and all our mothers continue
    mothering, like harbors,
    indefinitely.
    There’s a sense of indeterminacy
    with mothering and we take
    turns standing like breakwaters.
    Life is dangerous, wild, and yet
    we welcome it.
    We’re in therapy.
    It’s called water.
     
DISPATCH FROM THE FUTURE
    Yes, I am writing to you from there.
    Yes, in the future, we have excitement.
    Also: a forgiveness economy.
    All IOUs are tied to balloon
    strings and released into the atmosphere
    in an environmentally responsible way.
    Lunch is free for everybody. Lunch
    is peanut butter sandwiches, sliced
    on the diagonal, by mothers. We are sparkly.
    Everything is pleasure, but we are
    also acutely empathetic, like children.
    When one starts crying, another answers.
    A fugue state.
    We are sparkly but we also remember
    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.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    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.