by Jennifer K. Sweeney

I’m nostalgic for your brand of practice disaster,
your dress-up apocalypse pop-up shops
and school bus bunkers waiting with flats
of tin can dinners for the ball to drop,

nostalgic for the simplicity of your question:
whether modern life stood on nothing more
than strands of old code, a few worn fibers
holding up the whole frame.

Who knows? you seemed to say,
it was a good run, and maybe retracting
like an industrial tape measure back to yore
without electricity or running water

would be good for us, too soft, too
comfortable with our start-ups
and millennium pop songs. I confess, I liked
to say your initials, all caps like a license plate

on a Studebaker, hard K that signaled
a kitsch of danger. Like Oz
behind the curtain on its tinkered pulley,
you were all preface, setting up some high school

prank where we know it’s a stunt but go
along with the staging anyway because we love
a good strobe light and punch bowl.
Before txtng would consume language,

small towns slung into opioid stupor,
social media-eroded hours, before orange alerts
and orange tyrants, wars we couldn’t end,
school lockdown shooting sprees,

fire seasons that would parch the west,
hurricanes that would steal cities—the list is long,
Y2K, do you think you can stay up late enough?
Did you see it all coming in your lines of legacy code,

how the unraveling would be so slow we might
just miss it, doom-scrolling and doordashing,
rage-tweeting, masked and shutdown, 20/20, right
into a pandemic no one thought to be scared of?

I walked through a Midwest neighborhood
that last night—did we ever firmly agree
when the century officially ended and began?—
saw families in lawn chairs in their stockpiled

garages with coolers of beer casually rooting
for the ruins. If this was the apocalypse
they would go down quietly with hot wings
by the light of a mini antenna tv. Pitched toward

the futurama of flying cars and space pods and
freeze-dried meals, you offered up this Frankenstein
ruse at the rise of big tech, where we would
count down, zone by zone and some invisible binding

that held us would let go. I miss that
teenage melodrama, the metallic-painted amateur hour
you gathered the world around and did nothing
but usher us into the continuation of the story,

and when you died down and time was revealed
to be a construct that wouldn’t kill us, we resumed
living toward all the other things that would.
That night hospitals gave whistles to their patients

just in case the call-bells failed to ring nurses.
Y2K, I think we might be blowing them decades
too late and it turns out that we can’t hear
a cry for help the way we used to.

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by Jennifer K. Sweeney

In the dissolve of the ordinary—kitchen sink,
corralled line at the bank—I reach for myself
like a mother whose arm pushes back

her child-passenger at the stoplight or
I reach like a child carelessly
smoothing the silk of her mother’s

skirt while reciting bits of song.
Automated phone call, another stripe
of ants across the floor,

I do not think to do this but suddenly
realize I have been holding my shoulders
my face my throat O the throat so wants

to be held in a little cup of blue light.
The body with its aches and silences,
who can understand it?

Mostly the holding does little, but still
better than not. And sometimes it is the only
kind thing I can do. I often wish I were

kinder. That’s a hard one. Or maybe
less hard than it seems. Once I slept
in a tent in a field I thought was vacant

as a man I thought I loved tried to hold me.
The body and all its mistakes, the however
did I end up here filling the damp dome of canvas.

In the night, a cloud of wild horses came thundering
toward. I heard them through my body against
the ground from a great distance and then

so close as they skimmed the tent they nearly
trampled us and I held the sound gaining
and breaking, I laid down into it,

dug my fingers into the earth
as they rode the night, I knew their bodies
were waves and terror and distance,

though I never saw them. I knew
that the soul is a little bottle rocket
even when it seems a mistake

stuffed into a cheap coin purse,
and that a mistake is often a porthole
from which one can peer

to make out the shape of any approaching light.
I held my forehead when my thoughts felt too dark
to bear, I held my womb the years I could not

have a baby, I held my mouth
when I could not easily speak in a room.
And just once when I held my heart—

again my hands reaching for the thin pulse
to ease it, make certain it was there—
wet thump-wet thump, just once

it felt like that. Over the field my heart
came rushing, toward me and from me
without regard for the rest of the being,

and now, each time since,
I hold it to remember
that marvelous ruin of praise.

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