OBO by AJ Dykens-Hodapp

 Or best offer: code for, “I’ll accept anything.” In this new online garbage sale you have to accept everything. An iridescent angel finding you on your knees and offering two burial plots at Sunset Memorial, a grand apiece. Chicken carcasses under half a dozen aliases. Enough frozen breast milk to fill a fountain of youth. I have my crucifix right here, I’m trusting scammers. It all costs $1,234. You can’t sell nude camping; here is my body and there are the woods. A war of regional grillz stylez. Yes. No. Free dental. 

Now we know we’re not the only ones staying up at night worried future generations wouldn’t know what a stylish set of FLORIDA STYLE DEEP CUT GRILLZ go for in our day ($600, open to offers). I never thought posterity could understand a generation whose one hand is trying to recuperate losses on an unneeded BBL recovery cushion, and other hand offers to a friend what appears to be refreshing hand sanitizer but is truly STINKY ASS HAND GEL PRANK (“Looks completely normal, but smells like Stinky Ass”). My existential anxieties about our generational cohort’s future legibility subsided after finding in the donation pile OBO, AJ Dykens-Hodapp’s collection of Nashville Facebook Marketplace posts. It’s in between an anthropological work, found poetry, a prank, a diary, pixelated photo of the face of an apathetic digital god, it is the kind of thing AI wishes AI could make (Although there’s a remote chance AI is involved here even though it doesn’t seem like it, who the hell knows these days. On the topic of authenticity, there's also the question as to whether these are bona fide posts or materialized from AJ D-H's twisted imagination, and I don't know which is the more fecund factory of strangeness with what I know about online sellers. Wouldn’t spoil it too much for me tbh because there is an ecstatic authenticity to the work that feels revealing of its time and place and the aesthetic/comedic taste of its creator. Plus how do I know YOU aren’t AI?? [raised_eyebrow_emoji]).

What does it mean that this was donated to the poetry library? That we ought to engage it on the terms of poetry? (I don’t feel like going down the genre rabbit hole, I got other stuff to do… but the book does beg the question of how best to engage with it, and its proximity to poetry offers one answer, so we’ll call it one of those works that expands what poetry can be, wink wink)

Could it be that your Facebook Marketplace algorithm is your true self, the sum of your latent desires and semi-conscious clicking??? In the venue of offline public life, you present yourself the way you want to be seen, in your little Wranglers and camouflage hat. But the background data of your perusing constructs an unfiltered you: the wanter of a wood burl and a rust socket, wearer of gorilla masks. A city’s unmitigated secret name is fashioned the same way by what piles comprise its junk sales. Whatever its people collectively cast off is what it no longer values or can tolerate. And Nashville’s Facebook is the land of a thousand cowboy hats, acoustic guitars, and fishing rods under market price. So it is the home of fakers with broken dreams who will no longer try connecting with nature. That might be why the back cover dedicates the book to the “worst and best city in the world.”