Photo by Michael Broderick

the West. At night, my ex and I used to walk the kids down Naked Creek Hollow Road looking for bugs, mushrooms, and desiccated critters mummified by passing diesel trucks. We’d sit on the front porch and watch fireflies light up the neighbor’s cow pasture like madcap cosmic jewels.

I was born in Dayton, Ohio. I’m not quite sure if we the last generation born into an analog world, but I know we are damn sure close. I’m not saying the 80’s were any sort of magical time. Hell, it was the Reagan years and was shit for a lot of folks.

But it also was a time before the sedulous pace of the digital age. You can see this is all the works of Hayao Miyazaki and Shinichirō Watanabe’s “Cowboy Bebop.” It’s not a world that gets left behind or a dangerous return to some mythical past, but a “what if” creative proposition that blinks on and off in a dirty analog embedded into a sublime post-industrial landscape. All that’s to say, I love old decaying shit. I love things that are in pursuit of their most basic elemental reality: rust, lichen, moss, and sparklers, just as the sun sets on the fresh dew of my folks’

 backyard while my dogsrun around looking for trouble. It’s a love song for my folks and my home turf: Dayton, O.

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intersection of Spring Street and Franklin Avenue in Athens, Ohio. If you hit it just right, with just the right amount of moonlight, you get this lovely layering effect of moonlight branches and the soft-yellow light of the sodium lamps casting shadows on folks and critters passing by. Wren and I walked under the lamplight, holding hands in the silence of the dappled shadows of the sycamore tree and the warm glow of the sodium lamp casting long, lean shadows in the late October night.

This poem is the shadow piece of the “weariness of flight.” Several years ago, our friends moved to California and couldn’t take their dogs with them, so they asked us to take their dogs. They had a puppy and an older dogged named Amos. Let me just preface this by saying you should never trust anyone willing to get rid of their old dog. We took Amos. He was an awful dog.

Although Amos inspired this poem, he serves as a metaphor for the emotional and bodily exhaustion we all experience in late-stage capitalism as we try to navigate the everyday. This is the same weariness that Pablo Neruda speaks of when he says:

I am tired of remembering.
I want men when they’re born,
to breathe in naked flowers,
fresh soil, pure fire,
Not just what everyone breathes.
Leave the newborn in peace! ₁

The narrator of the poem’s first response to his dog’s potential death is not one of pity or sadness but one of abject weariness—simply tired at the thought of burying the dog.

Photo by Michael Broderick

design, the paper must be soaked and printed with the hand-wiped etching plate. After the paper dries, the type is then printed by being handfed into the 1890s treadle-operated Chandler and Price letterpress. The process results in embossed text and plate marks, which modern printing techniques cannot rival. We had intended to create an edition of 10 broadsides (poems plus image) and a limited edition book of poetry, but unfortunately, during the year-long process, my friend had a stroke, and we had to discontinue the project.

My dad died unexpectedly on June 5th, 2021—my brother’s 52 birthday. I’ll be 52 in 4 days. In May 2021, I was promoted to associate professor with tenure at JMU. It was a big deal. My mom never went to college, and my dad dropped out and never finished. My dad called and left a voicemail to congratulate me, but I missed his call. I called him back a little later that day, but he was drunk, and I immediately made up an excuse to get off the phone. It was the last time I talked to my dad before he died.

But my dad wouldn’t pass easily. He was a tough old son of a bitch and just would not give up the ghost. The nurses thought he might be waiting on someone and recommended that people say goodbye and tell him it was okay to go. So, it became my job to hold the phone as first my brother, then my uncle, and finally, my dad’s secret lover of 30 years as they said goodbye to my 

dad. “Hi Susan, it’s Michael. Tim’s youngest. We’ve never met, but my dad had a severe stroke and is dying in a hospice unit. Can you please come to say goodbye to my dad? I think he’s waiting on you.” Before the line went dead, she said, “I can’t. I’m sorry. I have family in, and I just can’t come.” She called back a couple of minutes later and asked if I’d let her talk to my dad.

Hi darling,” she said in a frail bravado as I held my iPhone over my dad’s chest rose and fell as he strained to clear his airway.

Photo by Michael Broderick

bits of ice ting tinged off the plate glass windows. It was as if all time had condensed into a single moment of dance and ice and moonlight. I could see her whole life unfold in an instant—including her going to college. I could see myself on that day trying to bravely fight back my tears and put on a cup of Irish breakfast tea. Kettle boiling. No Rosalie dancing.

The poem features myself and my daughter, Rosalie, reading. After we completed the album, we had a long discussion about how to order the songs. My co-producer, Miles Down, has made records for over 30 years, so he had a good idea of how to arrange the tunes for maximum

impact. But I insisted that we were not making an alt-rock album but piecing together a conceptual art piece about storytelling and loss. “You’re burying some goddamned barn burners.” It’s true. Typically, we would have front-loaded some of our strongest pieces, but I

was very clear about the topical arrangement. We were also mindful that audiences might not stay for the whole show if they had stacked spoken-word pieces, so we intentionally split them up. I also wanted to build tension within the piece. I thought of it less as an alt-rock album and more like a macabre vaudevillian striptease (reflected in the circus pipe organ)—make ‘em wait. In my mind, “sparkler” and “fire” are the 

fulcrum pieces or the midway point in the album. It represents the duende—how pain, loss, and trauma can serve as the bedrock of the beautiful. This poem is the beginning of my mom’s story, or Vivian’s story (my grandmother’s). In some ways, it’s the whole album in short verse. The Vivian stories could have served as the backbone for the entire album, but grief is tentacular. It kept finding other clam shells to open, looking for meat. We could have stripped away the other tentacles and just structured the Vivian stories as follows: sparkler, mountains, Vivian in blue, Saturn, and fire.

Photo by Michael Broderick

On June 5th, 2021, my dad died unexpectedly from a stroke. Two years later, in June 2023, my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 breast and lung cancer. Although she’s currently receiving targeted-drug treatment for her cancer, which is not a way of saying they’re killing her at home, her diagnosis is terminal. And this isn’t a tragic love story. My folks have been divorced for well over 30 years. It’s just dumb fucking luck.

This project began in earnest shortly after my mom told me she had terminal cancer. My mom and I are very close, and we talk almost every day. When I found out she was dying, I

needed something—I needed a container to hold on to my grief. That is this album: biplane. I love old shit and all the rotten detritus of the forgotten analog world, so the biplane appealed to me as a machine in its own right (I was also born in Dayton, Ohio, and didn’t grow up too far from the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop). But I think of the biplane as

a metaphor for an analog heart. An antique heart lost in a modern digital world of grief. When I found out my mom was dying, she asked what she could do for me. As she would say, “She doesn’t have a pot to piss in.” My parents grew up working class poor and will die the same way.  

My mom shares a small little duplex with her best friend from high school on Rosemont Blvd. in Dayton, Ohio. She’s a stone’s throw from the house she grew up in and the East Dayton Sausage Company. Eastside. Anyhow, she asked what she could do, and I asked her to keep a small journal of her daily musings so that when she died, I could turn his last thoughts into poetry as a way to deal with her death. So she started writing poems and texting them to me. This song, “mountains,” is a combination of my poetry and cobbled-together bits of text messages from my mom. I wrote the first stanza and the refrain, and she wrote stanzas two and three. It’s one hell of a last stanza:

I just sit out back when it’s sunny

try to take in the beauty of the flowers and warm air

and the days that seem endless

are not endless, and the

days that seem endless are no more.

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death—at the end of their block was a chicken slaughterhouse. My grandfather never mentioned Vivian again. I’ve often said this project is about beauty amid tremendous grief and loss, and it is, but it is, at its very foundation, an embodied account of intergenerational trauma. I have suffered and continue to suffer from pretty intense anxiety and depression—I think over the years, some folks have read it as a certain cool aloofness, but deep down, it’s just one thing: a central nervous system that interrupts any mild disruption as an absolute threat. I was baked in the oven of my mother’s trauma. She is the same. 

Vivian died when my mom was eight and left with my mentally ill father and her stepmother. When my mom was eighteen, she came home from work to find my grandfather sitting very much alive but unresponsive in his chair. “Daddy? Daddy. Daddy!” my mother yelled. Nothing. He had had a complete mental breakdown and was in a catatonic state. My mom called their family doctor, and he had a squad of men from the Dayton State Mental Hospital come and take my grandfather away. (Dr. Beezer. After my grandmother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, Dr. Beezer refused to give her a hysterectomy because it would “make her crazy.” She wasn’t allowed in the room when Dr. Beezer and my grandfather made the decision. She died a year later.)

My grandfather was institutionalized—also a child of trauma—and went through several rounds of shock therapy. He was never the same. That was in 1965.

My mother married my dad in 1968, and my brother Tim was born in 1969. I was born in 1972—17 years after Vivian’s death.

There’s a picture of my mom from 1955; she’s all dressed up in a brown wool overcoat and a smart wool cap. She looks adorned with a half-hearted grin. She’s standing in front of her mother’s grave.     She’ll be buried in that exact spot.

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I wrote this poem about the last time my mom and my aunt saw their mother, Vivian, alive. I’d only learned about this story in the last year or so. Since my mother has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, we sit on her front porch in Dayton, Ohio, and I ask her questions. When I was little, I got in a pretty bad accident and needed stitches. I got injured at a haunted house at the Montgomery Co. fairgrounds, which is directly across the street from Miami Valley Hospital. Even though I needed immediate medical attention, my mom refused for me to go to Maimi Valley. The last time I was home, I asked my mom why, and she told me this story.

In December of 1954, my mother recalled it was the best Christmas ever—toys scattered like birdseed under a small tree and shimmer of colored lights. Shortly after Christmas, in early January of 1955, my grandmother, Vivian, was admitted into the hospital in Dayton, Ohio, where she died of ovarian cancer just before her 38th birthday. My mom and my aunt weren’t allowed to go see their mom in the hospital, so one cold January day, my granddad bundled them up in their Sunday finest and took them to the sidewalk just below Vivian’s hospital room. They stood there cold, bundled up in their wool overcoats, and waved to their mom. She waved back like a silhouette in the window. It was the last time they saw their mother alive. My mom was eight, and my aunt Marty was four. She died in Miami Valley Hospital.

(The picture above is from my mom’s last Christmas with her mom, Vivian.)

Death has a lot of collateral damage, and in the end, my marriage could not sustain the grief I felt when my dad died. It’s hard to describe to folks who haven’t been through it. My mom called it the DDC-the-Dead Dad Club. She was in the DDC. It just never hits you in the way you think it will. It rocks your whole world, and I always thought grief was about something or someone, but it’s not. Grief is an entire atmosphere. It’s a planet. It’s the goddamned solar system.
And so, my dad died. I found out my mom was dying, and I got divorced after 23 years of marriage. Left my home, my garden, my cats, and my kids.
Now, I live alone.

Photo by Michael Broderick

It all makes sense. Mark Linkous shot and killed  himself in the chest in March 2010 in an alley in Knoxville, Tennessee—approximately a year after his dear friend Vic Chesnutt took his own life. It’s a small world. My friend Diane, the West Virginia printmaker, knew Vic and sketched him in the nude just before he died. Linkous was 47 years old. Jason Molina died in March 2013 of organ failure. He had struggled with alcoholism up until the time of his death. He was 39 when he died.

As I said above, I got married at the Damn Farm, but by the time we got married there, the old hippie intentional community had been divided up into three separate parcels. My friend Jody owned one of those 80-acre parcels, which was this beautiful ridgetop in Athens, Ohio, covered in oaks, hickories, and maples. This is where I got married at the top of the hill. We didn’t have any wedding invitations, and people found out about it by word of mouth. It was a potluck and a pig pickin’. I woke up about 5:30 AM that day and roasted a pig all day—got all gussied up just before the wedding started.

In the summer of 2017, I went home to see my dad. My grandma had just passed, and he moved into her old house. He lived amongst my grandma’s things and took care of her dog, Tess. I remember walking out to the car in my dad’s driveway when my friend Tim texted me: Mickey. We lost our Jody.

Awash in the last color before the gray.

Photo by Michael Broderick

This is an old country tune written by A.P. Carter (public domain) in 1928. The original tune featured Sara and A.P. Carter and Sara’s sister-in-law, Maybelle Carter. The tune is a beautiful dirge, but I’ve always found the call and response to be particularly haunting—as if A.P. is an echo from the grave. Maybelle’s daughter June married Johnny Cash the same year my mom and dad got hitched in 1968.

My dear friends, The McGovern Brothers, sing this version. We stripped out all the accompanying instruments (guitar, mandolin, and double-bass) to highlight the sheer raw emotion of the call and response. The video features family archival footage of my mom on the Easter following her mom’s death in January. Although my great uncle Lou was an amateur photographer and videographer, only about 2 minutes total of archival film featuring my mom survived. There’s a gap in my mom’s photographic history from the age of 8 (death of her mom) until about the age of 20 when she met my dad.

¹ Neruda, Pablo, 1904-1973 and Ilan. Stavans, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003.