What is future other than a constant assemblage of nows. As a species, we are stuck in a perpetual present—unable to move forward until we are in it, fleeting, then another present. Past represents the traceable-now. An inventory of nows. The future is not some far-off, distant idea—a dilapidated construct we can shrug off and come back to when more convenient. The future is now. The future-now.
We experience the future-now through concentric environments. The body being the first environment—a barometer of somatic engagement in the world. We know, bodily, that our livingness accumulates in a gorging way—a way that transforms multitudes of shared environments into uncertain foundations. The future-now riddles with promise and degradation. Maya Marshall speaks of the fallacy of steady in our current days. “We look up/ for some answer/ to our own greedy destruction./ The moon and sun do not look/ down. […]/ We little beasts/ gathered beneath them/ look up, as if any place is steady.” This looking up—as if sky or heavens or the celestial will hold less turbulent possibilities—is another act of nowness. What I find in this collection of poems, voices, and authors is this interrogation of nowness in relation to other ecologies of being: body, relationships, the more-than-human, identity, survival, aloneness, wonderment.
Growing up as a poor kid, considering the future felt like a state of being only the privileged could afford. I didn’t think of the future, but I did dream. As I’ve moved through socioeconomic classe, I double-down on this thought even more. I’m interested in how dreaming reimagines the concepts of future. KB Brookins writes, “someday you’ll be too busy living/ to exist in the past, someday you won’t need this poem.” The future is in the living, in the desire to not need. This is Brookins’ love letter “To Those Awaiting Top Surgery,” and a gorgeous imagining of the possible, a conjuring of a someday where the everyday violences and atrocities toward Trans beloveds is superseded by a release, by self-claiming, by just being able to live. Brookins reminds us that the future-now needs tenderness, a culture of care, a culture of love more than ever.
Annie Wenstrup’s poem “Threatened Embodiment” begins with aligning the uterus to a furrowed walnut, and furrowed walnut to furrowed brain. She explores what a body (and so too, a mind) digests, then remakes in order to move through the current climates of the environmental and sociopolitical. “My body takes this world/ and turns it into something/ I can love.” In Chet’la Sebree’s poem “Keepsakes,” the voice mulls over items, flashes of memory, and the idea of worthiness in relation to what stays with us. Our collections, too, a type of archive-of-the-now. Kristyn Garza’s communal-we calls out our species, along with the colonial imaginary. She points out in her poem, “A Truth,” our relentless harm to the more-than-human world. “We the pitiful we can’t even/ recognize when tragic apathy poisons us. Our body can’t help but shed tears/ for the dispossession of our tenderness.” Garza’s unflinching incantations give warning—what we sow, we will reap, bodily—“Teeth can’t speak straight amidst this heat that evaporates/ everything…” where a culling of the ecological is a culling of teeth, language, time, thought, and existence.
Within all of these poems shines a pulse of the future-now—where time is inextricably woven, the mess of us is exposed, where nuance haunts, and a fierce desire to look directly in the face of the difficult-to-imagine. These poets know that this moment is where the future becomes enacted. Reader, I hope you are as amazed as I am in these poetic worlds.