“Elegy for a Midwestern Punk Scene” & “a sonnet”
by Isobel Bess
Elegy for a Midwestern Punk Scene
Everybody I used to play music with died or moved
to LA or changed their sex or got a job
in an office and started a heterosexual family. Class
interest is class interest and the abattoir is an invitation,
right? Somebody has to drink all this blood. Hey have you tried salvia?
Nobody left around here is gonna 360 big spin a revolution
from the warehouse floor. I’ve got my own personal opioid crisis
going on and besides that it’s cold. I hear it never gets cold
in LA. The old guys downstairs keep inviting me to their
AA meetings but I say look guys I’m just here to practice
with my noise band okay? And one of them says you don’t have to
drink to have a drinking problem and I say you don’t have to drink
to have a noise band either. We nod to each other
at the bar across the street after practice but nobody says anything.
a sonnet
looked through some old horology manuals and thought about quitting poetry so many ways to count the passage of time like how many days without sleep now or how many hours short or how many layers of dirt on top of this other layer of dirt and how long is a radiocarbon year before present anyway well you see it’s complicated but it has something to do with all those atomic bombs and the changing composition of the atmosphere and ideology does a sonnet really have to have fourteen lines exactly dang
Isobel Bess is a poet and sound artist growing snap peas just outside of Philadelphia. She is co-author of Braided Channel with Amy Marvin. You can find her music at https://isobelbess.bandcamp.com.
Katbing (@katbingart) is a graphic designer, illustrator and muralist from Los Angeles. She has worked on large-scale installations for Tommy Hilfiger, The Hive Gallery & Studios in LA, and festivals including Desert Daze and Music Tastes Good. Katbing is currently trying her hand at stop motion animation and she is having a really good time and doing a gosh darn great job. Katbing is good at most sports.
