Christopher Salerno’s Deathbed Sext, 2019 winner of the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, is strange and tender and funny, an exploration of masculinity and mortality and urban life that also explores all sorts of new possibilities for sexting.
Parts of Deathbed Sext are overtly horrific, carrying violence like a torn and bloodied flag. The first poem in the collection, “Headfirst,” which follows a boy who’s been hit by a car (a hit and run driver), is very much one of those. Others are quite overtly surreal, which I think is part of the point. “The Reenactment” would, I think, always be a bit surreal—but reading it in 2023, it feels even more like an exercise inside a Dalí painting. I assume Salerno’s writing about a Civil War reenactment here, although I could be wrong; it doesn’t feel very Revolutionary to me. But oh, those last lines hit hard, and harder, even, in this time of profound unrest:
Quick fuse: / young man with a bandage / and a period gun sings an anthem / from the archive, steps through / a cloud of cannon smoke. / White sight. A horse-drawn / darkroom rumbles by. A butterfly / flags. The gods never arrive.
They never do arrive, do they, those gods meandering somewhere or other, leaving us to toil below? And what a dreadful muck we’ve made of everything, much like “the cavalry marching through / deep much,” except that we have neither music to march with nor “stern ravens” to watch over us. Which would make our shambolic progress at least a bit more interesting, would it not?
Deathbed Sext is, in the way of all good chapbooks, multilayered: even as I write this, I think of new interpretations, and know I’ll read it again. But for now, I’ll leave you with this thought from “Selfie with Sick Bacchus”: “faces in paintings are like dead / relatives in dreams, their eyes // pairs of dark gems.” But as much as we love that art, and those eyes, we cannot have them for our own:
but to buy it would cost us / everything. Like listening to the story // of our own afterlife, once the stars / pull out and frost hits the field.
Strange and tender, beautiful and funny, Deathbed Sext is an ode to this strange, difficult, beautiful modern world.
Essentially a Nerd 