2023.22/24
Its lack may soundbite the midnight wildfire,
crosshatch the visit from new friends and old
while transdestining that other one thing, that
uproarious non-nomenclatural swing-kid thing,4
that some-little-punk-with-whom-we-just-had-
to-deal-with kinda thing.5 Any way you cut it:
a thing.6 It’s presence, on the other hand, could
also mean sensorial overabundance,7 a lostness
from the [/]8
rides that left too many of us waiting9
or else our tardiness that left others. Forgiveness
only exists beyond what we’d extend to others.
Its easy antlered head should10 munch the leaves
outside our unified homes, crabappling the street’s
hot-afternoon underpinnings, summer’s
record written11 in bursts of
literary light—
but no moment, no progression,
no flow.
There is no such thing as flow.12
I prefer luminosity, it’s recognition renovation corpsing
over13 being stuck in the pictures, its othering cathode
raying against your conscience in baroque vortices
of Bakhtinian-Necromonger parade float–style; for
if you decline “every required turn on the parenthood
dance-hall floor,14 the Oneontan evenings,15 and16
ballet-class drinks,” it’ll just be other ends until I have
to start again anew, working and wondering forward
once more.
___________________________
4 Hear Swing Kids, Discography (1997; repr., San Diego, CA: Three One G [31G] #6, 2002), LP; and Denali, Denali (Wilmington, DE: Jade Tree Records JT 1073, 2002), LP.
5 Those years back.
6 Isn’t it always?
7 And hear Denali, The Instinct (Wilmington, DE: Jade Tree Records JT 1089, 2003), LP.
8 You do know at this point, right, that it is virtually impossible to keep starting over, to keep attempting to inhabit the present in each new sonnet, to keep projecting that weird prophecy-future-speak-lingo whatever all simultaneously without occasionally wanting to stress that, though serial, these poems are individual moments and, at times, as here, assemblages (of such moments). As such, transitions, beginnings, endings; heck; I just wanna jump form; et cetera, and so eo ipso, we’re gonna take a step in some other directions for a bit (i.e., toward tarnishedness and playing precarity in the network sublime). Porlock is never far away.
9 While regretting our pasts out past the break—er, let’s retire that crutch. Don’t see the original draft of “2023.23” because it was lost due to the accidental removal of my USB drive.
10 I guess feel free to.
11 Through unprecedented heat. July 2023 has been the hottest month in recorded history.
12 At least not in poetry, or, well, this poetry. Also: because it’s work.
13 The bourgeois daydreams of the new neofeudal empire. “Ew.” Lady Gaga, “Judas,” Born This Way (Santa Monica, CA: Streamline Records and Interscope Records B0015373-01, 2011), track A4, 2XLP, and “Lady Gaga - Judas (Official Music Video),” YouTube, May 3, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wagn8Wrmzuc&list=RDMMQeWBS0JBNzQ&index=27&ab_channel=LadyGagaVEVO. Also, add another to the early twenty-first-century dance file: hear and see Robyn, “Dancing on My Own,” Robyn (Sweden: Konichiwa Records 50999 949628 1 9, 2010), track A4, 2XLP, “Robyn - Dancing On My Own (Official Video),” YouTube, May 28, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcNo07Xp8aQ&list=RDMMQeWBS0JBNzQ&index=27&ab_channel=RobynVEVO.
14 See July 22, 2023, Newburgh, NY.
15 And more broken toes.
16 The jam band inviting you to play.
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.