personal electric vehicle
nearly september
kent wheeled.
kent wheeled.
kent wheeled.
i met him in intro to excel spreadsheets. we were assigned together. group project. three of us. i don’t really remember the other guy. i think he was from wisconsin cause he wore a graphic t-shirt emblazoned with the punchline “milwaukee: the weak are killed and eaten” every three days. unlike kent, he was not gorgeous. kent was a conduit of atëian estate.
he was 6’1”, the thinking man’s 6’3”, mandorla’d by diarrhea blond hair, possessed by joints more lithely parabolic than marrowly geometric. when he first arc’d into class, i immediately succumbed to the pendulous aureole of his vibe. it was like humidity, or nitrous poisoning. pricks at the ends of my digits, lips, and gooch. this zandy[1] was obviously totally ignorant to the reality that motion isn’t simple. i loved how arrested i was by his not totally willful unknowing.
it was the second week of class. he transferred in. he was so sexy for that.
so early in the term and we were already doing group work. the professor was clearly going through divorce–marriage and average hair follicle count. i professed to myself, right there, furtively, that kent and i wouldn’t be like that, detached and/or thinned.
—what’s kicks?
kent’s introduction to me. he was so fucking stupid. immediate eros.
—you couldn’t resist the call of data, huh?
i thought that would be a bit more cordial than asking why you would voluntarily switch into a faux-stats course as dreadful as what surrounded us.
—yeah i was in an intro to hobbes type beat class, but i decided that i would need these sheet skills to better articulate my own theories, but with something more real like integers. also, my dad said philosophy will make me talk like, ykno, one of them. i think he’s kind of a dickhead, but i’ll probably be working at his dealership this summer, so i can’t really not obey.
he didn’t elaborate on “one of them.” the median familial income of this college was like 200k a year, so i imagine he meant people with “gay voice” or “vaguely european voice.”
he was beautiful, and very obviously not a sans-culottes.
the other guy, the opaque goofball, interrupted.
—yooooooooo, my dad also owns a dealership!
right in october
kent moved through gravity with the uprightness of an ex-boy who had never experienced anything worse than slightly grating. in practice, this meant he traveled by electric scooter, typically weaving right in the middles of sidewalks and roads and bike trails.
most locals would find this method of movement to be basically evil, but the suburbanity which pervaded our institution instead conditioned the student body to consider his obstructiveness an entrepreneurial virtue. the campusways were always marked by chains of biblically accurate leerings, enviously impressed pupils following his ladneuvers.
in the 3 weeks since my first incitive encounter, we had become underclasspeers. not genuine friends yet, but about the closest a 19 year old could get in settings that operated according to the temporal strictures of icebreakers and ureagold malt liquor.
we would lap at coffees on friday afternoons. rather, i would suckle coffee. he would down a red bull and about 10 vanilla biscotti.
he scootered. i walked.
we’d complete our inane personal reflection assignments.
i’d listen to the dada morse code of his typing.
i’d sneak a look at his glabella wrinkle as he used ChattyPP to generate responses to his adviser’s emails.
sometimes the tips of our doc martens would touch.
during one of our early semi-scholastic ctrl+v sessions, kent admitted he was a 20 year old freshman. he reveled in a gap year after graduating from some supermundal private high school in some tristate area. he mentioned either delaware or the delaware river.
—it was so mint. haha. i was basically a gofer for appdevs that posted up in dublin. haha. cause the whole no tax shit. my dad and the dad of my boss played basketball together at the u of pitt. yeah haha. we’d do like 2.5 hour pub lunch breaks. i drank so much guiness. even if i was blindfolded, i could tell if a beer was a guiness. haha.
he spoke like the aftermath of a nasal irrigator: all greenboygush.
i loved him because of dramatic irony. he didn’t know i was an audience. i knew he didn’t know he was an idiot. why did he have to be astute? maybe 15 students on campus had any facility. he was belligerently affable. when our spreadsheeter TA’s futilely referenced obama era sketch comedy shows that people barely gave a fuck about even then, he would almsgive them a genuinely well-meated chortle. he was charity in chinos.
—what are you doing in a month?
my initial thought: following you around like someone who plausibly could have ended up as a serial killer, but never had a significant brain injury as a child. my second thought:
—a month? i’d say psychically preparing myself for another unshunnable rochester thanksgiving.
—oh toite. honestly, upstate new york gets haaaaaate, but lowkey i kind of fuck with it.
—lol no. rochester, minnesota: the city “of care and innovation.”
the pique upon his batterhued cheeks intimated that he may have not been privy to the existence of the land of 10,000 lakes. a slight blip, but his embouchure confidently recoiled back into its standard sightly grin.
—if you’re with it, the marketing students out of lautermilch hall are throwing a fundraiser rager just a little bit off campus. november 15. friday. it’s apparently national philanthropy day.
—riverside north?
—nonono. riveredge west.
—oh, so it’s going to be especially bacchanal?
i pronounced it as “buck-anal” just to see if kent would notice and correct me. he did not. awooga.
—helllll yeah. one of the alpha lautermilcher’s dad is pretty high up at like wells fargo or bear stearns or something. daddy loanbucks. i think they use their dorm room as a gaming den and or a space for their peloton. they definitely live at a ritzo 2000 square footer on riveredge. by the park with all the lactating angel fountains.
—i will slide through. but only if you won’t immediately abandon me to people that want to talk about how ai porn generator stocks are actually solid investments.
—okayokayokay. i’ll deflect them for like??? 45 minutes???
kent tautly smiled as if he was the first 20some to fathom up open mic standup tier quippage.
—i’m in no position to reject a compromise.
october (late and ghoulish)
in a cubicle, in the basement of the law library, i attempted to close read an assignment.[2] there were maybe 6 of us in the pits. law students rarely go downward.
i feebly stared at my intro to psych reading about all the different types of pill shapes. i wasn’t looking at the words. i was looking at the font. no. i wasn’t looking at the font. i was looking at the curves of the letters. i was quasi-dreaming in between garamond jags.
in my noonphasm, i envisioned kent’s thumbs and pointers morph into the convexes of e’s and n’s, only to then suddenly transmute into living gua sha scrapers. i felt the sturdy curl of his digits mercilessly rack my levator scapulae. this wasn’t a horny fantasy. or, it barely was. i really did have scholar neck. i really did want some capillaries to burst. i wanted him to know my growing kyphosis. but there were hurdles.
for the past two weeks, kent and i only had opportunities to chat during our spreadsheet class. this wasn’t symptomatic of some petty late teen faulting or anything jejunely asinine like that. while we were hitting the time of year underclasspersons realized the friends they made at gangrenously sweaty august mixers were actually grotesque chuds, we were actually just appropriately busy consorters. kent’s bruhful intrepidity had landed him treasurer of the campus extreme society.[3] i was working 12 hours a week as a dining hall janitor to pay off a workstudy loan and trying to finagle a radio show by volunteering myself to down another down into the station’s basement storage/arachnid graveyard. i invested a lot of my pupils into recording all the unregarded and unrespected ancient vinyl procured by past generations of scenesterian coeds.
of course i missed being regularly proximate to the benign heat of his pancakemixhued flesh, but also, absence makes the heart get lit-er. if kayaking down polluted midwestern waterways of swine feces and gizzard shad corpses made him happy, then I was content too.
a sudden outburst:
—SO RUNNNNN. RIGHT. RIGHT BACK TO SCHOOL.
a fauxgothboy scrambled to shove their headphones back into their macbook, the jack liberating dangleward like an athame.
a mangled ulna.
and then the letters were normal.
national philanthropy day
doondoondoondoondoondoondoondoon
bass drum tuned to d#. 138 bpm. mauve four x four to the pink floor. i am either at a college party or trapped in a bi tiktok otherworld.
—do you kn~~ wes?
—wes w~~?
doondoondoondoon
immersed in truculent volume. no decoding of speech here. one of kent’s bucolic hikehabituated familiars he dubbed “friend” attempted to chat. he had no name to me and i had no desire to discern if he was tedious or not.
—wes wesm~r~land. th~~ i~ hi~ pad!
he looked like weekly world’s batboy, but with a vile herrenvolkish haircut.
—oka~ yea~.
—this place ~~ n~~e. i rea~~y l~ke it ~ere.
doondoondoondoon
—y~~h ahu~.
the music nil’d us, consequently rousing the toothed lobes of my brain. fuck this dumb guy and his dumb head. he wasn’t kent.
doondoondoondoon
out of the purplingness, i saw him strobe into our bluerasp sticky corner. the man with the frisian marauder jaw. kent oh kent oh kent. the basswall, however, millstoned my excitement. his typically staunch grin smirked itself with ethyl and woe.
—yo ~~~~ wha~ it do?
—hey m~~. ~t’s l~~d ~s ~hit.
—his eyes looked like grapes just hankering to rot, but also under an industrial hydraulic press.
his mouth mawed. out gushed more green.
doondoondoondoon
—thi~ seme~~er h~s ~een so toug~ d~de like i ca~~ot ev~n lie the spr~~dsheet cla~s is e~sy b~t ev~~ything e~se has b~~n disastrous my st~ts cou~se h~~ be~n absolutely f~~~~~g me i ju~t don’t get h~w to fine~~e numb~~s like th~t and hon~~tly my dad h~s ~~en threatening m~ with cutting ~~ off ~f i d~n’t g~t ~t least a 3.4 ~~~ this se~ester and like also i’~ sooooo p~nt up but som~h~w imp~rta~t[4] i was h~~king up with ~~~~~ l~~t night and i just could~~’t perform y~~ f~~l me it’s like everything is m~~~ment mo~~me~~ move~~~~
it’~ l~~e everyth~~g i~ this f~~k~~~ song
doondoondoondoon he trailed off. or i did. his voice? d4 tones. passing notes. below us? the d#’s. clamor. pathetic. i felt my bowels pratfall. a totally unrecognizable meld of dyscrasia. an abject love and a reverent ick collapsing into each other. we’re so over. we’re so back. coterminous. doondoondoondoondoondoondoondoon early december i wasn’t neurotically avoiding kent. i hadn’t seen him in like 15 days. he wasn’t going to class. i probably wouldn’t have ignored him if he went to lecture, but i admit that i wasn’t keen on stumbling into him on sidewalks between, ykno, the “center for very insightful critical analysis” and the “make drones more fast lab.” his philanthropy day contraromantic outpouring was just so, so miserable. i found him pitiful, and luscious, and that twoness had given me an ambitious heartburn. weeks now. 3 weeks of bile. i resolved to de-acid and de-kent myself. i exited intro to spreadsheets. i popped a calc carbonate. i walked to my dorm. it was raining pretty hard. historically abnormal for this latitude. but, probably the coldest it was gonna be on average from now on considering what carbon does when it’s in the sky. through the dropletting, i could hear a birr swell, an unpedestrian thrum arouse, a jump scare. kent erratically quivered through the downfall, to my left, without saying “on your left.” he was definitely exceeding 15 mph and he certainly did not recognize the back of my head. my healthgoth raincoat did anonymize me, sure, but i doubt he had memorized the RGB of my hair. and he scootered off, accelerating around loamy, klee-y, puddles, straight onto yaxley boulevard. in that moment, he didn’t entertain courtesy. he didn’t press the crosswalk button. he didn’t stop. the pickup truck stopped, but after about 4/5ths of a second. the ’03 150 lurched right into the person’d half of the scooter. kent careened, really, he kentreened, over the hood, hitting the windshield, like a katydid in a puffy fleece jacket, and falling backward beside the driver’s engorged frontwheel. kent’s not unfamiliarly flaccid frame descended to the cement of yaxley. his body blanched and stilled underneath the assailant’s truck door decal: a confederate flag with “sleepyjoestole.org” impactfonted over it. i realized that i didn’t remember if there was ever a moment in my first 19 years that could have been something other than this. late january i felt the hurtle of her before i saw her outpass me. bridgit wheeled. Mini-interview with Jenkin Benson HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)? JB: This is going to sound like such a “midwesterner goes to NYC with rosy, rosy eyes” comment and it is. Last summer, I revealed some stuff I had been deliberating on at a very intimate poetry reading in Bed-Stuy’s Burly Coffee. I didn’t really write that much between 2017 and 2022, so it felt like a “yeah, I’m back in this thing” moment. When I returned to South Bend, I fixated on my work, with healthful and avid abandon. I think it was a psychic and practical break. As a younger writer, I was preoccupied with wedging myself into literary convention: “I won’t be derivative in a regular, contrived, hack way. I will be my own unique form of derivative.” Post-NYC? I try not to be hyperconscious of my influences anymore. You just have to type. It was my first time in the city, so I’m sure I’m projecting some fatuous provincial enchantment onto the experience, but it truly was such a blast. Please, anyone reading this, invite me to read at your NY gig. I must return. HFR: What are you reading? JB: I’m currently reading for my PhD comprehensive exams (20th century Britain and Ireland). My personal supplementary list is very Cymru-centric: David Jones, Dylan Thomas, Caradoc Evans, Jean Rhys, Jane Arden, Raymond Williams, and several others. I’m trying to pair the especially prosaic work on my comp list, stuff like The Good Soldier and The Secret Agent, with unconventional poetry I’m less familiar with. I’m getting into P. Inman and Alice Notley. I principally read and write poetry, so the influx of fiction has been simultaneously disorienting and significantly incitive. HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “personal electric vehicle”? JB: Back in January, the university which employs me banned electric scooters on campus (thankfully). I hated those things so much. They’re so dangerous. None of the undergrads that rode them ever said “on your left.” Just a violent discourtesy. One actually caught on fire in the business school. The battery exploded. So, of course, I funneled my disdain into writing. How does a jejune electric scooterer’s brain work? How do they just do that? I’m really fascinated by wealthy Zoomer microcultures. They’re only like 8-10 years younger than me, but the internet seems to accelerate superficial generational differences. I, a person born in 1995, feel like I’m a half-century older than a person born in 2003. I imagine a lot of people in previous generations have experienced this exact same phenomenon, it can’t be a novel feeling, but they definitely did not experience campuses plagued by the ubiquity of locomoting X-Games-type bludgeons. Of course, outside the campus bounds, PEV’s are not strictly a Zoomerian motion. But, in this microculture? Profoundly Zoomer. And so, the two wheels offered an inroad (so to speak) into that commanding, fascinating unpleasantness. HFR: What’s next? What are you working on? JB: I currently have three chapbooks and a full length, all poetry, all ready for publication. They are out there in Submissionland right now. Chapbook 1: 6th man award – narrative series of poems regarding my 8th grade basketball season and the settler colonial consciousness of Midwestern Americans. Chapbook 2: your loser world – basically my response to Pound’s Pisan Cantos. A vandalization of the fascistic legacy of paratactic avant-gardism that underpins so much experimental Anglophone poetry. Chapbook 3: the compulser – ruminations on anxiety, fixation, and obsessive compulsion under the strictures of capital. Full length: are we rocking with this? – me reaffirming that complaint and banter are legitimate modes of poiesis. When will these be published? Who knows? Hopefully soon. To be candidly mopey, I find the contemporary domain of publishing to be increasingly dismissive of, if not actively hostile to, weird poetics, critical poetics, radical poetics. But hey, also, what’s new? HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share? JB: 10 imperatives for writers: Jenkin Benson is a third year PhD student at the University of Notre Dame. He principally studies the creative interchange between Welsh and Irish modernists. You can find links to his poetry here: chillsubs.com/user/siencynapbened. Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses. [1] zoomer dandy [2] vaguely scan [3] granola duders who liked to hike at the nearest state parks. [4] he meant “impot~~t.”
bridgit wheeled.
bridgit wheeled.
Heavy Feather Review 