“So Little to Recollect” by Aaron Lee Moore

Don’t ya’ll remember Y2K?
It wasn’t all that long ago,
But in the scheme of history our collective faces
Ought rightly still be red.

 

We pined for planes plummeting down to earth
–Murderous Mack trucks, sadistic soda machines,
Lawnmowers chasing down little kids
Like in Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive,
Or the less imaginative just for failed ATM’s.
The poets among us for falcons gauging the eyes
Of belligerent falconers.

 

We all secretly hoped the millennial ball in Times Square
Would reset to 1900 and drop downward in flames:
Didn’t we?

 

There were some holed up in bunkers
Outside Y2K compliant outhouses
–A lifetime supply of toilet paper,
The last feculent, mired scraps of civilization.
The meek poised to inherit the earth
And reorganize a new age-old paradigm
Using guns, saltine crackers, castles of potted meat.

 

We seem now to have little to recollect from that time,
Still little to learn from the year 999,
And the fanatical hysteria over one of the many Last Judgments
(It wasn’t the first).
And so it all just keeps going round and round and round again and again and again
Because we have so little to recollect.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aaron Lee Moore is a doctoral candidate in Sichuan University’s Comparative Literature program and recipient of a Full Chinese Government Scholarship. Two years prior he was a Peace Corps university English teacher serving in Xindu, China. He received an MA in American Literature from Florida State University where he specialized in Faulkner Studies and received a BA in English from Radford University. He is also the chief editor of a print literary magazine, Floyd County Moonshine, which has been in production over 6 years. He grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Floyd, Virginia.