Rebecca Brock
Mixed Tapes
Is the question, what holds us?
Or is the question, what do we hold?
In one sitting, my son plays me REM,
The Cocteau Twins, Death Grips, Johnny Cash,
MF Doom—he pivots genres, eras with his phone
and finger tips, plays snatches of an album
to explain it, to show the whole arc of an artist
and then shifts again without context
of time, place, politic beyond his own.
1990’s era Janet Jackson followed by The Velvet
Underground. Overwhelmed, I try to explain
the mixed tape, the hours of listening
to the radio, to songs I didn’t like, hovering,
ready to record the song I did love, the song I hoped
had found its way into the top nine at nine,
how long it took to sort the exact order
of song to song, an emotional journey toward or through
a friendship, a love interest, a rendering of myself.
He says: What, like a playlist?
And I say: No, mixtapes were real, tangible.
What’s real and not real? he asks.
And I see how a song or an artist
might hold him: This is me, right now,
me hearing this story, me knowing this lyric.
I remember thinking I was known too,
by what I loved, by how well I loved.
Were you wrong? he asks,
calling up a mixtape of memory:
his birth, the suddenness
of him, that first illness, the days after
and after as he grew in the orbit of me
as we learned each other and he became
and became and became,
all along my own becoming,
me slow learning the songs
he will choose, the songs I have already
chosen. No, love, I say, No,
I wasn’t wrong.
Rebecca Brock is the author of The Way Land Breaks (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023). Her work appears in The Threepenny Review, CALYX, THRUSH, Whale Road Review and elsewhere. In 2022, she won the Kelsay Books Women’s Poetry Prize. She lives in Virigina. You can find more of her work at www.rebeccabrock.org.