Maggie Graber

Premature Elegy for the Early 21st Century Hipster

Mascot of the Age of Information:
your time will come.
Ask the curator at the Museum
of Human Histories, or
the geologist who loves volcanoes
so much, she’d camp on that lip
of rock to watch a pool of magma
bubble like tomato soup.
Who wouldn’t want to return
from logic’s ledge, say
they’ve listened to lava? One day
you will live in a glass case.
One day a graduate student will study
the significance of facial hair and flannel,
earning their Ph.D. after hours
of analyzing your cultural accumulations--
bowling trophies, berets, Soviet jackets--
how you dressed yourself in languages
you did not understand
yet no one claimed your name.
You, an existential dilemma.
I wonder if you’re already dead.
Wouldn’t you have been the first to know?
What dreams did you not share?
Did your neck pulse a bass line
of half notes? Did the sidewalk sewers
sing? Herds of taxicabs painted like tigers,
did the engines purr you to sleep?
No, I’ve come here like an evangelist
to tell you, except
forget Jesus. Forget how one day
someone will write their dissertation
on the cultural representations of Christ,
drawing parallels between the hipster beard
and a lack of transcendence. No.
Before you go, tell me
how the earth’s core is 9,800 degrees.
Tell me how you think it feels
to burn that deep.



--
Maggie Graber is a writer originally from Northern Indiana. She’s been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Luminarts Cultural Foundation and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Duende, Atticus Review, Stirring: A Literary Collection, and Toad, among others. A former radio DJ and farmhand, she currently lives and works as an environmental educator on the Cahaba River in central Alabama.