The World
It may seem cocky to call this poem
“The World,” as if I am qualified to speak
about all humanity or the complex
and vulnerable home we share,
but I am referring to The World
Theatre where we screen old or artsy films
for five dollars, where I volunteer to ask,
“Do you want your root beer in a small
or large?” as I spill ice chips and kick
them beneath the counter. We don’t take tips, but
we do have a donation jar because The World
is both a nonprofit
and a landmark we’re trying to keep alive.
We need a stronger air conditioner.
Look at the ceiling, and you’ll see
the pendant lamps that make historians
cheer. Touch the oak banister,
and I’ll wipe your prints away at night’s end.
(At The World, we say our oily popcorn
is The Best Popcorn in The World.)
Inside, the ivy carved into the original
proscenium arch says, Hey, look how long
humans can preserve beauty, but in the world
outside The World, someone this minute
is buying a marker for a hateful poster
to brandish at people. Some animal
is the last of their species to fall
in the grass, too rare for us to notice
yet. It’s dark even in daytime
when we show a matinee.
We are surrounded by strangers.
The World chooses films it can afford,
films about cool characters obligated
to express emotions only ironically,
or films about people with budding
self-esteem and desires to run marathons.
When the hero at last admits she can’t
do it by herself and enlists her best
friend’s help, we all applaud. When we
showed the documentary about the pope—
when he said, “How wonderful
it would be while we discover faraway planets,
to rediscover the needs of the brothers
and sisters who are orbiting around us,”
all the non-Catholics in the room cried
audibly. I heard sniffles from three corners.
You can do that in this World
where no one can see if you are hip or tough
enough for all these days require of us.
You can fan yourself with oily fingers
in the increasingly warm air
and—for any reason—
cry as much as you want.
You’d Think by Now We Could Spell “Apocalypse” Without Looking It Up
The definition, nobody bothers to read because you don’t
ask the dictionary, What is summer? in July. Besides,
who has time, and, besides, can we remember to eat our vegetables
tonight with so many simultaneous crises to keep track of? In other words,
you try for normal, you go for a sunny Sunday drive
until you see four horses in a field, get anxious about the four
horsemen. No, the kid in the back seat is not reciting pestilence, famine
war, etc. He is naming wildflowers.
The word’s definition, according to the internet
theologians is Revelation, like the end book of the Bible, which ends,
yes, with the end of the world, but maybe only the end
of the Roman Empire, depending on your reading, and in any
case the word means unveiling.
“We’re seeing the unhidden truth,” they say (about human nature
and empire and nature-nature) like the cloth lifted from a painting
for sale. But if this is an art auction, who is bidding on these rising
temperatures? The art appreciation night class from my adolescence
did not explain this. When I look at the pictures
in the news, I want to tell the whole internet in all caps
WELL HEY HUMANITY, WE WILL GET THROUGH THIS,
but instead I close the laptop.
Most of my silent moments happen because the right answers take
more time than I have, and I am too embarrassed at what I might say.
For example, one night picking me up from art class, my mother asked me—
her teenage son—
“Some people say Georgia O’Keeffe’s flower paintings look like lady parts,
how do you feel?” It felt like the end of the world, trapped in that car.
We were driving to the airport for my step-gramma’s funeral
because that’s how life works: You stay in a hotel with your snoring mother,
remembering an old woman who rather than chin up, told her gangly, fearful
step-grandchild take heart as if heartiness and a slice of bravery
were right there, waiting for you
to grab like angel food cake, like that song I’d thought went
Come and get your love, until I decided that seemed far too easy
to be the lyrics. But it turned out those are the lyrics,
even on the radio after Step-Gramma Jean’s funeral
when we rushed from the tombstone but missed the flight anyway.
Do you remember
how it was before airplanes? Before electricity?
We carried our lanterns high and saw only a few feet ahead.
It was enough, then, to stand in a field and not know
what lay on the other side.
We were used to not having electronic answers in our pockets.
We hadn’t heard of CO2, didn’t realize an ozone
kept us warm at night—a wool blanket we would eventually cut
a hole into. Now we’re too cold except when
we’re too hot, which is often. Often rarities happen. Often accidents.
Often bullets. Often governments. Often empires. Often
ineffectual bystanding. Often injustices we can’t spell
or precisely name. Often pestilence. Often weather
we call acts of God like someone else’s fault. Often repeating itself. It’s a marathon
no one is born ready for, and you owe
no apologies if your feet are not yet callused by it.
In other words, we are sadder than we’ll say.
Sometimes too sad even for wildflowers. It is July,
our outdoor thermometers are busy cracking
while we ask the dictionary in our pockets What is summer?
It is true. Grandparents in every country are dying for reasons we never
imagined, it is true. Rangers are wrapping the world’s largest tree
in fireproof blankets, it is true,
the story buzzes in my pocket while I am frozen silent
in the stairwell at the Art Institute of Chicago, looking
for the first time at this Georgia O’Keeffe painting.
It barely fits on the wall, it barely fit when it hung in San Francisco,
they had to pull those museum doors apart to carry it in.
I thought it was sheep in a field or a picture of skin, a diagram
of cells below the epidermis, but no
it is Sky Above Clouds IV. It is pink and soft blue,
with white, rounded rectangles stacked beneath, like the gentlest
brick wall, holding up the air.
It’s a view looking down at the clouds
and the clouds and the clouds and
I count 163. If you lift your chin up,
the sky above them. The placard says O’Keeffe wanted
to paint what awed her from her first airplane window
in the 1960s and she worked in the cold because
no little indoor studio could hold the canvas of all she saw.
Monet’s poppies make you want to dance, but he could not
paint this painting, and Cassatt
could not paint this painting, nor Michelangelo, despite
his fondness for the heavenly, because though this view has always existed,
airplanes did not,
so what did we know? What?
And now all the white rectangles freeze me,
plus three Chicagoans,
in this stare, in this stair-
well, well hey humanity, take it all in, all of this,
and all those pictures from today, and even so, take heart,
come and get your love, marathoners get your water, scientists
get your microscopes. We are getting out of bed this morning,
dammit, and tomorrow morning and the next morning
and the truth cannot stop us
because surely—we are betting—
there is still beauty all around us
that just hasn’t yet been unveiled.
Brad Aaron Modlin is the Reynolds Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska, Kearney, where he teaches undergraduates and in the online graduate Creative Writing program. His internationally viral poetry has been experienced two million times. His poetry book Everyone at This Party Has Two Names is available from Black Lawrence Press. His work appears in the 2025 Pushcart Prize Anthology; Brevity; Poetry Unbound; The Slowdown; & The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. www.bradaaronmodlin.com