Three Poems
by Bradley J. Fest
2023.26
It’s always been better to be them, to embrace
every ounce of analogicity into your serpent arms
sweeping us into that great adamantine maw
pronouncing alexandrines and tetrameters. Because
motherfucker, we’re coming out of mosh retirement.¹
Will we be reborn some Nope-alien in the sky?
Will we pass? Will we after-adjust the thick
yearly rhythms? The John Donne again?
Williams. Diaz. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Beyoncé.² Will we finally cease the festivities
and just always get through to our students
and children and parents from here on out?
We couplet. We love each other into the most
distant horizon’s doubts about the Big Bang.³
We also can’t turn. It’s the whole point.
The unceasing swerve of love.
2023.27
“‘The Mars Volta fucking ruled.’⁴
Their tesseracting the last twenty
years into my pumping arms and
bad screamfalsettos and all those
poems of mine even I’m not
a huge fan of⁵—incredible.”⁶ Later,
all your other favorite contemporary
poets will sing the present perfectly.⁷
And so I’ll be proudly encouraged
by the inevitability of a member of
the new teenage mech-enhanced
supertroopers one day becoming
our bard. At minimum, it’s why
we’re alive, breathing.⁸ Très historique.
2023.28
They were dancing like Jodi Picoult
in athletic goggles,
like chronometric
biomassing paramours deep-
nostalgiaing⁹ into it (and the new stuff) and then¹⁰ yawp
audacitying the new glens, the neovales immediately past
no further directions. I can whisper.
I can believe in youth, in the end ofgenocide.¹¹ I can believe.
I can also ironobelieve, turn that shit up, pastelling,
torching the triumphalists in newspapers of doom.
“It just ain’t
no damn thing. Ah.”¹² Everything is a damn thing
right now. Other things are also the opposite of mountain
goddesses embracing history’s embalmed, sheltering them
from the decades’ bros, aren’t they?
Notes
¹ For Botch, Brooklyn, NY, November 10, 2023.
² Will we finally drain our midrange jumpers on Sunday? Yeah. My shot’s back. [Midlife crises aren’t all bad.]
³ See Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser, “The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel,” New York Times, September 2, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/opinion/cosmology-crisis-webb-telescope.html.
⁴ Hear and remember The Mars Volta, King’s Theater, Brooklyn, NY, September 22, 2023. Linda-Philomène Tsoungui is a kinetic revelation.
⁵ You know the ones.
⁶ [One of the speakers in these sonnets is the stranger from Fest, “Symphony of the Great Transnational” (2007), in
The Rocking Chair, 15–23.] Their doomcrooning and jubilation shook me.
⁷ All their songs will be about how no one can stop them from rocking. Not even death.
⁸ Dancing.
⁹ Hear Converge, “I Can Tell You about Pain,” The Dusk in Us, track A5, and see for God’s sake Russian Circles, “‘Gnosis’ (Official Video),” YouTube, August 10, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUf9_1jsCyY&list=RD4ORKSSYZKpU&index=20&ab_channel=SargentHou se.
¹⁰ The song that started it off.
¹¹ See the world in October 2023.
¹² These Arms Are Snakes, “Meet Your Mayor.” Or at least that’s what I hear.
Bradley J. Fest is associate professor of English and the 2022–25 Cora A. Babcock Chair in English at Hartwick College. 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), along with 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.