Field Notes on a Brief Craze
by Joshua Aiken
after Cornelius Eady
“I can make you live forever,
All you gotta do is dance until you die”
— BROCKHAMPTON
Both tethered and alone, the body cries.
Clear encasing, skeleton as sonic tongue.
We don’t just harbor rhythm, aporetically,
we dock the statutes of wobble and fat,
as an ocean of subterranean glint is cued.
Cop that sweat if you can and you can’t.
“We call it scalding the air.”
I dance and the world is vestigial.
I dance and the steadfast vulture loses speed.
Blessed wrench of the bump and hustle:
unlock the radiator, let us steam in love--
and talk a whole lot of shit as we do.
This, our sound registry, fastened to a stone.
“I can make you live forever,
All you gotta do is dance until you die”
— BROCKHAMPTON
Both tethered and alone, the body cries.
Clear encasing, skeleton as sonic tongue.
We don’t just harbor rhythm, aporetically,
we dock the statutes of wobble and fat,
as an ocean of subterranean glint is cued.
Cop that sweat if you can and you can’t.
“We call it scalding the air.”
I dance and the world is vestigial.
I dance and the steadfast vulture loses speed.
Blessed wrench of the bump and hustle:
unlock the radiator, let us steam in love--
and talk a whole lot of shit as we do.
This, our sound registry, fastened to a stone.
Joshua Aiken is a Cave Canem fellow whose work has appeared in Boulevard, glitterMOB, Juked, NightBlock, Assaracus, TENDE RLOIN, Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, and Winter Tangerine. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut where he is a first-year J.D./Ph.D. in History and African-American Studies at Yale.