Description
Winner of the Spring 2015 Black River Chapbook Competition
Notes on the End of the World is a quiet apocalypse. You won’t find huge explosions or sudden extinctions in Meghan Privitello’s poems. Here, the days are marked instead by quiet disappearances, abandoned objects, details that might be otherwise overlooked. Objects double as warning signs: “The asbestos siding is a hologram in the leftover sun. / At once, it is a dollhouse made of bones.” Animals speak in prophetic visions: “In the dead cells of her skin, / I have found your family. / There is an outline of a great tree. / They are all there-roped / around their necks, hanging.”
These poems hold a microscope to life’s mundane details, but they are also poems of agency-when the apocalypse comes, what use is a “good life?” When the apocalypse comes, Privitello asks us to be honest, unflinching. With each passing day, Notes on the End of the World gets louder and quieter, lonelier and lovelier. The end of the world does not look so different from an ordinary day, so pay attention. In the end, Privitello’s poems leave room for regret and the hope of redemption-but not much.
DAY 6
It is no dream to live in a house
with blown out windows and molting snakes.
Any child’s drawing would tell you so:
the driveway, the garden, the smoking chimney.
I sleep with a pistol between my legs so often
that any man would be a soft nuisance.
This quiet is the quiet of watching a living thing
die, when you hit yourself for having believed the heart
could ever resemble a red bird.
I would give up all of my memories of trains
if one passed through the foothills as I watched.
All to say, there is enough emptiness to be buried
wherever the weathervane stops.
There is enough emptiness to feel holy.
At night, the wind upsets the shutters, the shingles.
And although I knew a bucket of morphine
and a glass of scotch would kill it,
I killed it.
