Poetry / Conor Bracken
:: Hodad Visits a Museum ::
Magritte’s La Reproduction Interdite You stand in front of the painting and look at the back of the head of a man who is looking at the back of his own head. Reflexively you smooth an historical cowlick down. (“‘Think of a table,’ he said, ‘when you’re not there.’”) The world, its oyster forks and traffic cones, brassieres and thumbscrews and geostatic satellites locked on targets we want to sort into analytic categories of enemy or just collateral—it all rattles in the junk drawer of your mind so you limit yourself to the painting. When you’re not with yourself, what are you? The lacquer-headed subject? His reflection? You could be the shape between them, a wobbly vase of air too weak to hold itself to any material account. You’re not the mantel, not the mirror gulping parallactic at the world and gleaming more! At best you are the book: simple, half-legible, too short to see in the mirror the title on your spine. All night ransacking your pages for whatever feels like your name. Like tiger, maybe, or Grampus. Pirogue, perhaps or labyrinth. Possibly mutineer.
:: Hodad Explains Veterans’ Day to His Five-Year-Old ::
In her grandfather’s hand- me-down station wagon her great-grandfather’s CD of Best All-Time Marches blares John Philip Sousa’s “Semper Fidelis.” Snow whirls and stalls, gyrates and stalls, pulling plate-sized leaves off the sycamores and pasting them where they’ll rot into feed for the branches they fell from. We are driving to school. It feels inaccurate to say “John Philip Sousa is playing” when he died almost a century ago, but these notes, their arrangement, the interlocking crescendi and dramatic crashes are his. A system and sequence of sound but not the sound itself. I turn the sousaphones down so I can hear her in the backseat asking if her grandfather, her great grandfathers did “anything bad while they were in war.” The trees can’t help what they eat, but they share what they get with who needs it most via mycorrhizal networks, symbiotic complexes composed of fungus encasing root tips in hyphal sheaths. I think of the friend shipping bottles of iced tea to buddies he knew from Basic in Fallujah after filling them with contraband whiskey. No one got caught or felt bad, because this economic rhizome whose fruiting body we call a state has always loved the label more than the contents. For instance: in the car she is a passenger. At school she becomes a student. And in between, in the snow, she is not a child running, backpack bouncing, her friends’ names written on the air in cloudy gouts of breath—she is a heat signature, in- cinerating snowflakes the world will never hold again.
From the writer
:: Account ::
These poems follow, or are in the voice/headspace of, an alter ego I’ve named “hodad.” Though a hodad is a guy who embodies the “all the gear and no idear” ethos, with more tan and lingo than any innate surfing ability, the persona and the poems have little to do with surfing and much more to do with performance, machismo, posturing, and a hollowness in the middle that might be spiritual or might be what makes music possible. Maybe both. In any case, it’s a way for me to grab hold of and wrestle with the militarism and reflexive nationalism that my upbringing instilled in me, thanks to my nuclear and extended family’s implication in US government and military roles, and to exorcize it so that I do not inculcate something similar in my children.
Having been a father for seven years, it’s become very clear to me that children are not inherently or intuitively adapted to the built and living world. At the same time, the world itself is finely-tuned for doing violence to inattentive or unguarded kids. As someone who is dispositionally inclined toward compromise, consensus, and harmony, and who sociopolitically finds it important, as a white-passing cis-het male, to cede space and not speak over or dictate to others, I’ve learned that a measure of assertion, in instructing my kids or protecting them from dangers, is often essential. And so I’ve been having to reconfigure my expectations and performance of masculinity to accommodate the realities of parenting and fatherhood, while at the same time recognizing how easily assertiveness, in the service of security, can bloom into the kind of surveillant, suppressive practices the US and other military-industrial extractive capitalistic nations use on their own citizens.
The empire begins in the home and moves outward. I saw this in my own childhood, and in the childhoods of friends, family, acquaintances, and others. These hodad poems are trying to identify and root out tendencies—inborn, learned, or something else—that, if nourished, could help propagate the empire. They also want to disentangle the individual from the nation that wants to swallow them, so as to hold, and maybe pity, or maybe soothe, them, because like masculinity, empire harms all whom it touches. This is not to exonerate or condone, but to remind us that we will all benefit when we find our way past it.
Conor Bracken is a poet and translator. His latest translations are of Jean D’Amérique’s Workshop of Silence (Vanderbilt, 2025) and Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s The Burial and other short prose (UVA, 2026), and his second book of poems, All-American Dad (Bridwell), is due out fall 2026. Recent work can be found in American Poetry Review, AzonaL, Cincinnati Review, the Cleveland Review of Books, Coma, Copper Nickel, mercury firs, Sixth Finch, and On the Seawall. He teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.