I’ve been thinking about David Berman’s suicide lately as I pick up, wobbly, his song “Nights That Won’t Happen,” in which he is thinking about it. I suspect because there’s a lot of reason for despair right now, and I’m coming to term with that impulse and those around me. But I gotta let you know that’s not what this new poem in the Bennington Review #14 is about, but it is about mortality, what a sudden piercing awareness of it made adhere and, in that, this song adhered. / It mostly wrote itself in 2020 (or 2021?). From a part of our life together I don’t think I want to share with the machines rendering all of these letters down to slurry. / And the poem will be in its fuller rage-sorrow-visions of cities context in my next book Buffalo Free Rapid Transit in the spring. / Some poets I love in the issue–Tim Liu, Ian U Lockaby, TR Brady (“Testosterone Daydream”!), Matt Klane. Ok. Hang in there, keep scratching away in yr tunnels, you dank moles.

O, here’s the Berman song.

&, to get out of the funk, a banger by anti-imperialist hardcore band Znous.