Out of range of North Korean missiles here in Saint Louis — I looked on a map. Out of range, but not of the secondary ash cloud, if the Yellowstone supervolcano explodes. Or the old nuclear-waste dump meets underground landfill-fire a couple of miles from the airport. Definitely in range of drought, storm, flood, famine, pandemic, riot, economic collapse, dirty bomb, mass shooting, rape, carjack, burglary, stroke, heart attack, cancer, mechanical failures of various kinds —

Thinking about Corso and Ginsberg being chased out of a meeting of an antinuke group at Oxford by audience members throwing shoes, because Corso read, “O Bomb I love you / I want to kiss your clank eat your boom / … / I want to put a lollipop / in thy furcal mouth” — his poem saying, Why fear Bomb? It’s just another kind of Death, which will come for us all, generous friend —

But I’d wanted to write about feeling lost, before I woke up thinking about the nation. How finally — when? A week ago! Eons ago! Ten executive orders ago! — at the end of my session with Jensen, I said I’d felt for months like someone had jammed a helmet and breastplate over me and I’d been trying ever since to get it off. He said, “What if you’re not supposed to take it off? What if you’re supposed to find a sword to go with it?”

Yesterday I went to see Jensen and while I was on the table, he told me the story of the Birth and Death corn. While he held the back of my head, probing my fucked-up neck with his fingers. While I was coming off S.’s grief because J. left her, D.’s grief because R. left him, because D.’s father died and grief spun out reactive until he stood in tears at the bottom of my stairs. I’d had a laundry basket in one arm and D. in the other, he was about to vanish into a cell in Christ in the Desert, my Jewish Buddhist friend. And I was feeling so scared of walking into the future – when the present felt so dark and changed —

A couple he’d worked with. The mother in labor and the baby’s heart stopping. The father so freaked out he called Jensen from the room where they were jumping the baby, trying to get it to start — race race jump and its battery going, “but the doctors aren’t happy —" the father said to Jensen on the phone. Because the brain was long gone. By law, they had to keep it hooked up for four days, until damage could be itemized, asserted as fact — but everyone knew the soul-baby was gone, and they were tending a meat balloon.

The four days passed and they let the body go. And then, as he prodded my neck and moved my skull around like a cap shoved wrong on top of a bottle — they sowed her umbilical into the ground. Mixed with seed corn and the mother’s placenta. And nine months later, when the new corn was ready, they mashed it with water, making a pulp — Jensen was there, he told me about it. While I lay there so scared of walking into the future, how the family gave everyone who’d gathered a cup — And he said, Everyone

drank her. They drank her, and to me it was the opposite of grief’s black milk — they told stories about the soul-baby’s lineage. How her spirit rode the stories like a current, the drinking and the telling were the same. To be remembered, he said, and to nourish. And then he moved one hand from my neck to my sacrum, and with the other pushed a finger deep into my belly, into the crossroad hole in my network of scars — once I’d been a baby who’d been born dying. And really, wasn’t that how each of us was born? Grow now, and die in the future. He told me about the Birth and Death corn.