Bradley J. Fest: 2023.32 • Cleaver Magazine

Poetry by Bradley J. Fest
2023.32

Soaring amaranthis getting you down on the floor again? Diane Seuss’s long line’ll [1] set things
right while hazarding the new kinds of loneliness. The body that is your body is and always has
been somebody else’s body, once. The ways that lead to dancing. Birth and decay. The glittermob
death’s heads swarming beyond the fundament of your second-best chance at immortality.

These were the days to accidentally misplace our hitlist in the abattoir’s back rooms, all that
glory, days of breakbeat jubilation at being a human on the angel’s shoulder facing the opposite
direction, you know, away from the nightmare of history and its hypercapitals and desertifications
and wars. So, the lines are too long, truly. They require an endurance that can’t even bother pretending

it didn’t volta here just because it needed to, had to, must without any doubt from above or below
change. [Did the layout too, the product more than just words.] Yea, become what it is. I despair
its architecture, its too easy evidence of temporal failures and nonappearance. But then it’ll just
turn and keep going, the moments and the ones after them, turn not beyond but about the grain

we’d been so ardently brushed against, once. Or double back and finish the first thought, looking
at something different, being able to see it, imagine it, hope for it, bring it forth into our light.

1: See Diane Seuss, frank: sonnets (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2021).

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, was 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.