Joely Williams
Science Fictional
Every morning I run the simulation:
what if the city is still there,
what if the language is still spoken,
what if we made it through the century
without losing the things we meant to keep.
The simulation keeps changing its mind.
Some mornings the city stands.
Some mornings it is underwater.
Some mornings it is someone else’s now
and we are the immigrants in their history books-
the cautionary tale, the resilience narrative,
depending on the chapter.
I run it anyway.
Speculative is just another word for hope
that knows it might be wrong.
_______________
Joely Williams is an Afro-Boricua poet from the South Bronx currently living in South Carolina, where she is still adjusting to the silence and the alarming number of churches visible from a single intersection. She is the author of Even the Spider Keeps Records and Put the Phone Down, We Have a Job to Do. Her work appears in PREE, The Woolf, In Parentheses, Northern New England Review, and elsewhere. She runs the Poetry Letter Club, mailing handwritten poems in recycled book-page envelopes to readers who still believe mail can save a life.
Author’s Backstory/Crafting Elements: “Science Fictional” began with thinking about the future as something we are constantly rehearsing for, even when we do not realize it. I was interested in the way we imagine possible futures every day: when we wonder if a place will still exist, if a language or people will survive, or if the things we love will make it through whatever comes next. Coming from a recent trip back home to the Bronx and seeing how much has changed, this really triggered me in a way that I can’t fully explain but that I tried to tackle in this piece. Gentrification and whatnot.
The poem uses the language of simulation because so much of modern life involves prediction. We are constantly calculating outcomes- socially, environmentally, politically, personally. I wanted to explore that feeling of running different versions of the future in our minds and discovering that none of them are stable or concrete.
The city in the poem represents more than a physical place. It holds memory, language, culture, and belonging. The question “what if the city is still there” is both literal and emotional. Cities change. Neighborhoods disappear. Languages fade. People leave. But the desire to preserve what shaped us remains. And it’s also alluding to the cities that we lost to colonization and history.
I was also thinking about the way history often reduces people’s experiences into categories after the fact— “the cautionary tale,” “the resilience narrative.” Those phrases can flatten complicated lives into something easier to consume. The poem pushes against that simplification by asking what happens when the people who lived through those changes are the ones imagining the future and not actually taking part in the building of it but being forced to be the upholders of it.
The final line, “Speculative is just another word for hope / that knows it might be wrong,” is the center of the poem. To imagine survival is not the same as believing everything will be fine. Sometimes hope is simply the decision to keep creating possibilities, even without guarantees.
Editor’s Comments/Image Credit: The somewhat abstract image (Photo by Rafael de Nadai on Unsplash) has a sense of materializing, as if a simulation is almost over. (The city in the photograph is São Paulo, Brazil).