What can you sing when everything’s in boxes? Packing up the song of myself. It’s the day after New Year’s, and I’m already-ready to restart my restart. Cutting and pasting antidepressant martinis with a little anesthesia of the third person. She pictures the house through filters like “distant past,” “Jesus etiquette,” and “foxnewsforever” and remembers what it felt like to love a president the way a child loves her parents. Fast forward to a midcentury modern middle-of-the-night under a thick blanket of snow. Talk talk talk me to sleep, she says, count the she-she-sheep riding an elided Brooklyn Ferry (see: Wikipedia). So sick of being inside a body forced to move out into the boring well-intentioned world beyond the bedroom door. But does writing poetry have the efficacy to be headline therapy or heart medication? This is me asking. The dude-poet reading Catherine’s book, spitting daylight in a gas mask, watching his hair turn white. The Empty Season by Catherine Bresner (Diode Editions, 2018).
