In All the Futures

Abstract

In All the Futures Emily Jungmin Yoon (bio) You are still on the island we love,you are in a bathtub, twice framed by water, and let’s say in this scenario,the red-whiskered bulbul that was born outside our door, nesting by the desiccated toad,is now seventy years old. Say we believed enough timeswith thorough sincerity the promises that we will happen to dieon the same day. For all these years, we let the old wavesfold over our ordinary heads never hurting us,generous, full, [End Page 427] shining with ancient livessoftening in the kind of aloneno earthly darkness can know. Every day, I labor to hope that the ocean stays unskinnedof its ice and you always have water to spare. Now let’s imagine that I wenthappy, sure of this. Selfish, I know. I always have been. In all the futures I am capable of prayer for,you are not alone — you are alive. [End Page 428] Emily Jungmin Yoon Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco 2018), winner of the 2019 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award and finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is the poetry editor for The Margins and a PhD candidate in Korean Literature at the University of Chicago. Copyright © 2021 The University of the South