2023.21
If the sonnets achieve the inmost fear
at the absolute depths’ darkest darkness1
—not even there. Never there. Why would
it be there, there where it is? We won’t even
bother stopping at the infinite “Atmospheric
Voyage IV – A Downtempo Chillwave Mix
[ Chill - Relax - Study ]”2–mode until later.
And then it comes on. . . . And then it
comes on. And then another sonnet
and another racketing into the suspended
points of concrescence they’d gather unto
themselves, porcelaining the sky if they
could,3 if they could want what we want,
what we want from the world we share:
hereness, nowness.
___________________________
1 Hear These Arms Are Snakes, “Meet Your Mayor.”
2 YouTube, May 2, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z55w5fXqEQ&ab_channel=ChillPulseMusic.
3 Would, should.
Bradley J. Fest is associate professor of English and the 2022–25 Cora A. Babcock Chair in English at Hartwick College, where he has taught courses in creative writing, poetry and poetics, digital studies, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States literature since 2017. He is the author of three volumes of poetry, The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015), The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017), and 2013–2017: Sonnets (LJMcD Communications, 2024), the first volume in his ongoing American sonnet sequence. He has also written a number of essays on contemporary literature and culture, which have been published in boundary 2, CounterText, Critique, Genre, Scale in Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and elsewhere. More information is available at bradleyjfest.com.