By Gerry LaFemina

The field speckled with yellow patches
because there’s been one rain in weeks
& the temps all record-breakers so that

even the canal is parched, even the dandelions
growing with abandon on its banks, &
the mountain breeze is just hot breath,

an upset parent looming but with nothing
to say. Sunlight seems wavy in it all:
visible & almost quivering. In America

we love our music festivals almost as much
as some love their guns or a beer tent.
Especially in heat like today’s.

Especially after punching out.
Especially when the guitars are turned up to
the sweet spot where the frequencies

break up & distort slightly—a line of bees
working among the weeds & wild flowers.
In 1982 I designed a science project:

signals, sound waves, & what certain musicians
call fuzz. A single cut guitar, an amp,
a makeshift oscilloscope—nothing that impressed

the teacher, Ms Cox, or the girl
whose braces had recently been removed
so she smiled for the first time that day

without promptly looking at the floor,
a smile that seemed to announce it was spring.
I couldn’t know both would be dead

within the end of the decade—one of cancer
& one by her father’s pistol & her own hand.
Sometimes I think if I’d only told her

about the hundred butterflies her smile’d released
I might have changed that future, but how
does a 14 year old boy say such a thing

without a guitar? If I had managed to,
maybe we would have taken the long subways
to Coney Island on the hottest day of July

beach sand coal-hot on our bare soles
‘til we had no choice but to rush in
to the breakers, the water greenbrown

but still able to wash away both sweat & sadness
so that later, free of whatever heartache
that is also American & fetishized here,

the two of us would stroll the boardwalk
eating Italian ices & sometimes touching fingers
in a way that is certain only in its uncertainty.

Maybe I would have tried to win a stuffed animal
shooting an air rifle at a small target
in hopes she would sleep with it & think of me.

The Cyclone roaring in the distance. But no—
our lives were no after school special
& when I imagine her at all, I think

only of how cold & heavy that weapon
must have felt in her small, shaking hand,
not that it would have made a difference—

the pistol was still lighter than whatever grief
had burrowed like a tick inside her.
Maybe the guy on stage right now,

the guy with the Telecaster & a growl
in his throat that suggests he’s seen some shit,
maybe in this slow buzzing rocker in E minor

he’ll get that sadness right—Julia’s or mine
or at least his own. The closing
minor chord sustained, breaking up,

almost tragic & so American,
especially how some here in the field sway along,
& afterward, how they cheer.