Bradley J. Fest: 2023.15–16

It’s been unfortunate how our midnight cities recede:
the dark rides through the isthmic foothills and
wolfsnow crafting summer night swimming—
nothing left, no aphaeresis, just indigo mornings

begging for more: we are now freedom, some
previous thing within our own preverified vitality
gone out ahead of itself without obsequious
intentionality, without falling into the ever newer

neoconfessionality endorsed up and down the lanes
threatening to stop these orexic festivities. It’s faster
now. Since then, it’s all been the singularity of the most
important moment of your life spread over the whole

and nothing, all a fight to relate. It’s been so much.
Then the come down: the absolute fucking worst;

lonely as hell. Tonight, we’re not working and walking;
we’re noogony assembling, a right-there edge of
communicating literally everything with you,
another shot at the light. The algorithms of the flaps

of your soul just might shunt love into the arms
of your beloveds if we all get together now and form
a pack for the betterment of humanity; we’ll
reparatively multiply; we’ll ecogenesis the daylights

out of planetarity’s abulic horizon and also redeem
our first worst decision. Lovely. “And then there was
that one time you played the most amazing beat.”
It was as if destined, syncopated beyond tomorrow’s

threshold, saturated in retro-nostalgia’s premium
perfume, a sadness beyond what your parents warned
you against.

Bradley J. Fest

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 two volumes of poetry, The Rocking Chair (Blue Sketch, 2015) and The Shape of Things (Salò, 2017), and 2013–2017: Sonnets, the first volume in his ongoing sonnet sequence, will be published by LJMcD Communications in July 2024. 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.