I was interested in exploring this sense of The End, of how human psyches might coalesce in such a space. I turned from animalized consciousnesses to thinking about adolescence, of how one might come-into-being in such a world. I wrote several short pieces imagining what it would be like to be a teenager at the end of time. How does one become in a state where everything is and always already in full burgeoning? I noticed a marked desultoriness in these pieces. The future is potentially a place without hope. One must cling to other fantasies for meaning. My young hero clings to zer’s “activism,” to the art of mime ze practices to ostensibly imbue the daily with new life.

In his preface for his 1992 collection Science Fiction (Pantograph Press), Andrew Joron writes that “to thematize the loss of subjectivity as an act of awakening is the moment of resistance in the speculative poem.” But what if there are no resistances in the future? What if we are too fully of it? Sharkness taught me that we cannot reject an encounter with difference. It is like the environment we move through. We are of it. It eats us.

I am not interested in subjectivity’s “loss” or “resistance.” I want to consider its potential future ways of being. My Speculative Poetics therefore explores compliance and integrations, their effects.