All That Disappears – Harpy Hybrid Review

“Look behind you, turn, look down as much as you can, notice all that disappears.”
– Jorie Graham, “To 2040”

1

Postmodernism

– As of March 2025, the 21st century has witnessed
the deaths of 4.7 million people worldwide,
through war and acts of terrorism, and an
additional 3.8 million indirect deaths, according
to the Costs of War Project, Brown University.

Today’s poetry has no relevance – without lines of bodies
piled over the bombed and bloodied streets – meters of
buildings crumbling with hate – stanzas of sirens and
screams, the tremble of crying children – metaphors
of missiles, yellow streaks through darkness – the rhyme
of dead faces – and the most frightening theme – a
numbing quiet – after.

2

The Cost

– families lost:
Jarghoun in Gaza City; Kotz in Gan Yovne;
Bazylevych in Lviv; 13 from one family, Tora,
North Darfur; 39 from one family, Raqqa; 10
from one family, Kabul…

It’s not pins on a board, not graphs from PowerPoints,
not press conferences, podcasts, headline clips. It’s a
family, huddled around shards of broken bowls, plates,
and glass, holding each other – waiting for the next
missile strike, the chair overturned, the table gone,
debris drifting to the floor – it’s the night leaking in.

3

“We are the Martians now”

– line from the film Quatermass and the Pit

With no real defense against the deeps of space,
forced landings, colonies by proxy, or stand-ins for
someone else’s future – we slog, stomp, and kick
for survival – while our politics blunders through
the dark like a thing with no name – breaking down
doors, smashing windows, eating our own, never
saying what we mean.

4

“It is good to have an end to journey toward”

– after a line by Ursula K. Le Guin and an
image of JADES-GS-z14-0, a star-forming galaxy,
13.4 billion light years from Earth – the most
distant, observed galaxy

Rivers, sunsets, mountains, highways find their end –
in points of beginning: the sea’s great surging, all colors
of afternoon drifting to darkness, the silence of clouds
and cold, and fields swelling into beauty words can
never touch. I look up from my desk, imagining
the most distant galaxy at the edge of before.

Sam Rasnake

Three Questions for Sam Rasnake

What inspired your choice and form?

I responded to a challenge from my writers’ group to write pieces (prose poem, micro, or lyric poetry) using 53 words. The approach fused ideas and images to a more core-like state. There was no room for waste. Every word, every bit of punctuation or its lack became vital. This allowed a fresh perspective for my writing, a new vantage point. The more I wrote, the more the pieces I was working on drafted closer to the 53-word goal. The writing became natural for me, and I began exploring topics I probably wouldn’t have approached otherwise.

What was your creative process for this work?

I followed ideas in my daily writing — one piece leading to another. It became quite organic. Sometimes the writing was completely spontaneous or in the form of stream of consciousness. At some point, the subject matter moved into the political arena, and I began to think about events in the world, in the US in particular, both past and present. Fear, loss, sadness, and culpability seemed to forge the writing into what became “All That Disappears.” There was a despair, a darkness. Rather than avoiding the subject matter, I followed its path, and the poem became cathartic for me.

What is the significance of the piece to you?

This suite holds a special place for me. Once I’d written it, I had a title and a foundation for a longer wip. I later wrote a fifth section, following a line from Emily Dickinson, which, in its own way, sums up the isolation and apocalyptic feelings that thread their way through the other four sections. Here’s the final part:

5. “My letter to the World”

          after a line from Emily Dickinson

These are sentences I’m taking with me—holding
all the words, squeezing out every intention—pulling
them down over my head, closing off the threatening
skies—breathing them until the only sound is what I
read aloud to the darkness, my eyes, accustomed to
their solitude, moving left to right, right to left…

Sam Rasnake is the author of Fallen Leaves (Ballerini Press, forthcoming), Cinéma Vérité (A-Minor Press) and Like a Thread to Follow (Cyberwit). His works have appeared in Wigleaf, Stone Circle Review, Boudin (McNeese Review), Moist Poetry Journal, FRiGG, UCity Review, Best of the Web, Southern Poetry Anthology, and Bending Genres Anthology. Follow Sam on Bluesky @samrasnake.bsky.social.