Before I read Brian Teare’s poem, “Doomstead Days,” I had never heard of a doomstead. It’s a clever portmanteau, combining homestead with doomsday: an alternative universe where the homestead is a preparation for the climate apocalypse.

The poem Brian weaves around his encounter with this word is a lyrical romp through our connection to land, water, and each other. Water flows, gender is fluid, and the rigid binaries of our imaginations dissolve.

Brian’s exploration of the doomstead unearths some vital questions about ecological crisis. How do we respond? How are we, as a society, fleeing to our doomsteads and hiding, waiting for disaster, hoping to survive? What does it look like for us to leave our doomsteads, engage the problems directly, and find collective solutions?

Brian Teare is the author of eight chapbooks and seven books of poetry, including, Doomstead Days, which won the Four Quartets Prize. He is the recipient of many awards and honors, including fellowships from Guggenheim, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Pew. He currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia. He’s also an editor and publisher and makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

At over 1300 words, this poem is much longer than the others we’ve featured in our Poets series, but it’s worth it.

This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.

Brian Teare

A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books. His most recent publications are a diptych of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the 2024 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Doomstead Days By Brian Teare today’s gender is rain it touches everything with its little silver epistemology mottled like a brook trout with a hundred spots white as bark scars on this slim trunk thrust up from one sidewalk square the four square feet of open ground given a street tree twiggy perimeter continually clipped by parking or car door or passing trash truck that snaps an actual branch I find haunting the little plot  its winged achenes auto-rotate down to it’s not that I don’t like a wide sidewalk or the 45 bus that grinds right by but if organisms didn’t insist on forms of resistance they’d be dead of anthropocentric technomechanical systems whose grids restrict the living through perpetual stress that elicits intense physical response like an animal panic hitting the psoas with cramps or root fungus sunk in the maple’s allotment of city property as tolerably wide  as the migraine that begins at the base of my skull & pinches with breadth calipers my temples until the feel of flay arrays the dura’s surface inside the bones inside the head the healer holds in her hands & says the occiput is shut flat & irks the nerves that thread through its unappeasable shunt into the spine I see a white light I keep thinking about the way long drought dries out topsoil so deep beneath its surface the first hard rain wreaks flood taking the good dirt with it the way today’s wet excess escapes its four square feet of exposed root & rivers out a flex of sediment alluvial over the civic cement of the anthropocene in currents a supple rippled velvet dun as Wissahickon creek in fall’s brief season of redd & spawn  when brook trout in chill quick shallows once dug into gravel to let nested eggs mix with milt & turn pearls translucent as raw unpolished quartz each white eyed ova flawed by a black fleck my eyes close over at the height of migraine fertile error waiting with incipient tail ready to propel it deeper into nausea until the healer halts its hatching & calms neuralgia between the heels of her hands pressing the occiput back open into the natural curve the bones forget the way the banks of the Wissahickon have forgotten rapids rinsing schist shaded by hemlock that kept the brook trout cold each patterned aspect of habitat lost first to dams & mills & industry runoff & plots of flax Germantown planted for paper & cloth made with water’s power & hauled out of the precipitous gorge up rough narrow roads south to the city port before adelgids took the crucial dark from under hemlocks sun heating the rocky creek down steep rills to the lower Schuylkill wide in its final miles dammed at Fairmount for two centuries of coal silt & dredge fabric dye & sewage that gave rise to typhus & refinery spills that gave rise to fire rinsed by this gender that remembers current’s circuit anadromous shad & striped bass leaving the Atlantic heading upriver shedding saltwater for fresh in runs whose numbers turned the green river silver if color counts as epistemology spring sun on the backs of a thousand shad is a form of knowing  local to another century & the duller color of ours is the way the word gender remembers it once meant to f**k beget or give birth sibling to generate & engender all fertile at the root & continuous as falling water molecules smoothing the sparkling gnarl of Wissahickon schist until its surface mirrors their force the fuel element & fundament alike derive thriving from being at its biggest when it’s kinetic energy headed toward intensity everything’s body connected by this  totally elastic materiality I feel as ecstatic wide dilation when the shut skull gives up resistance to the healer’s hands & the occiput opens its bones my mind’s eye goes okay I’m awake now rowdy with trout psoas relaxed my body’s a conduit it roars with water passing from past to present through pipes & riparian ecotones alike all of my fluids pollutants cycling back into my own watershed toxins & heavy metals bonded to blood stored in liver & fat C8 glyphosate mercury & lead it’s awkward okay I keep thinking about the man who asks me to visit his doomstead which seems kinky for a first date what’s the safeword for men with genders built for the world’s end men with weaponized genders hoarding solar power & canned goods bottled water genders tending small vegetable gardens out back behind the chickens concrete genders sealed in lead their doors secured from inside with thick steel bars fringe libertarian endtimes genders hetero girlie camo gun calendars apocalyptic tits pinned on brick walls by lone bunks so the men can cross out each day once civil society ends with a pathetic snivel like please help doomstead men live doomstead days already sealed in extreme fiction as if there were ever a way to stay safely self-contained by which I mean the anthropocene is its own gender biospheric in scale its persistent flux from fossil record to Antarctic ice core so uncontainable we all exhibit it with a local sense of personal chosen expression strategic or contingent like fertility medicalized tracked managed or casual happy f*****g without a condom risky given the odds    leveraged against us & the blameless microbes seeking homes in our nooks & tubes so I don’t visit his doomstead a psychic structure I feel in my head as blocked thought I watch play out in the Schuylkill where it pools wide shallow with silt above Fairmount dam I stand on the bank & know I’m not supposed to posit  an analogy between the river & my body but courtesy of this dam the city siphons its water into me another human intervention diverting its path each of my cells a little prison the river sits in  so we’re related on a molecular level so intimate I think I can say it wants speed & movement free enough to jump the strained relation to human needs it serves without relief without the hands that hold my bones & tend my fascia that remember a different posture without blockage or pain a model for undoing harm done by capital empowered to frack during record drought millions of gallons of toxic wastewater injected into earth or kept in open ponds prone & porous in western counties where river otters have rebounded after last being spotted in the Allegheny in 1899 otters are raucous & chirp chitter chuckle & grumble when wrestling together or sliding on ice playful biophony rivers have missed for a whole century like brook trout rooting in loose cool gravel or the plash of insects fallen from hemlocks the intact eastern riverine biome one serious mess of sound enmeshed in sound enmeshed in biotic patterns as heavy as traffic when the weekend weather is nice & I ride the early 27 bus to the Wissahickon it’s not that I don’t like the city it’s just if biodiversity is a measure of health a city is by definition sick with people & built structures crowding out other lives though I love signs species persist this sidewalk moss probably bryum argentum native to guano-covered seabird rookeries this fertile gingko stinking up the street with stone fruits crushed underfoot this nameless fern in a downpipe drain so modest in scale like the simple songs of house sparrows everywhere though  this chubby one is hustling a fallen everything bagel of seeds & crumbs & it’s not that I don’t like people either our sociality genitals & smells interesting diction surprising privacies revealed at parties bars & in bedrooms our genders in acts various & wet as thought product of dissolved salts washing our brains in rich cognition that falters without water which can’t be taken by the head in the hands & held in the hopes of healing its body is too vast its mind boundless by definition the world is awake be careful my dears it is the gender that remembers everything

Copyright Credit: Brian Teare, "Doomstead Days" from Doomstead Days. Copyright © 2019 by Brian Teare.  Reprinted by permission of Nightboat Books.

Recommended Media

Nightboat Books

Link To Complete Poem

Credits

This episode was researched by Elena Cebulash and edited by Sarah Westrich and Mo Armstrong. Music is by Daniel Rodriguez Vivas. Mixing is by Morgan Honaker.

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