I was bornbecause of loveinside a weapons lab.The End—Omega Bridge—connectsthe town, the littleboxes lit alongthe cliffs. For lovethe men awakeand crossthe bridge to laboron their bombsfor love. For lovebecomes a bodyin the world. And fear.A fear comes with itto the world, a cryin air burst firstfrom lungs. And grief,the instant born,the shape of whatwill come, the shapeof what they’d seen. Becomethen students ofthe sun, to will thatfire here to burn. The bombmakers always burnedwith so much love—the fatherpillars of my child selfin church who prayedthe sun to earthto burn upeverythingfor love. For love-fused fear.For grief.
Feature Date
- February 27, 2023
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
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“For love” from AFTER WE ALL DIED: by Allison Cobb.
Published by Ahsahta Press on October 31, 2016.
Copyright © 2016 by Allison Cobb.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Allison Cobb (pronouns she/her) is the author of four books: Plastic: an Autobiography (winner of the Oregon Book Award and the Firecracker Award); Green-Wood; After We All Died; and Born2.
Cobb’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, and many other journals. She has been a resident artist at Djerassi and Playa and received fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
A native of Los Alamos, NM, where the first atomic bombs were made, Allison collaborated in Suspended Moment performances with Hiroshima native and visual artist Yukiyo Kawano, Butoh dancer Meshi Chavez, and sound artist Lisa DeGrace.
Allison sits on the board of Fonograf Editions, and is Senior Director for Equity and Justice at Environmental Defense Fund. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Poetry. Ecopoetics. In AFTER WE ALL DIED, poet Allison Cobb examines modes of crisis not from the point of recognizing they are impending or even inevitable, but from the realization one's entire reality—on the scale of the individual, the cultural, the ecological—has been an eventuality constructed within the crosshairs of history. Combining various iterations of the anxiousness common to life in late-capitalist America with the claustrophobic awareness of Earth's biopolitical fate, the book copes with calamity through mourning, placing at its conceptual and emotional center the question when did everything die? Rather than claiming to have an answer, or providing an insufficient one, this inquiry is suspended, mid-air, so that readers might reconsider the circumstances under which such a question must be articulated: not because an answer will save us, but because acknowledging it as unanswerable begins the process of understanding one's grief.
"Poet Allison Cobb's new book AFTER WE ALL DIED (Ahsahta Press) is thrilling—inventive, visionary, hard-thought, and impossible to put down...Five shining stars and highly recommended."
—Carolyn Forché
"Allison Cobb's After We All Died constructs a new sentence like DNA, short and broad, wrapped and boundless, threading the middle space between prose and verse with lines that extend the voice beyond the boundaries of the body. Facts stack against one another deadly and accurate as bombs, chronicling the hyper-weaponized culture of late capitalism with alarming casualness… A sobering, clarifying look at the present moment.”
—D.A. Powell
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