Dear Y2K,

By Jennifer K. Sweeney

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I’m nostalgic for your brand of practice disaster,
your dress-up apocalypse pop-up shops
and school bus bunkers waiting with flats
of tin can dinners for the ball to drop,

nostalgic for the simplicity of your question:
whether modern life stood on nothing more
than strands of old code, a few worn fibers
holding up the whole frame.

Who knows? you seemed to say, 
it was a good run, and maybe retracting
like an industrial tape measure back to yore
without electricity or running water 

would be good for us, too soft, too 
comfortable with our start-ups 
and millennium pop songs. I confess, I liked 
to say your initials, all caps like a license plate

on a Studebaker, hard K that signaled 
a kitsch of danger. Like Oz 
behind the curtain on its tinkered pulley, 
you were all preface, setting up some high school 

prank where we know it’s a stunt but go 
along with the staging anyway because we love
a good strobe light and punch bowl. 
Before txtng would consume language, 

small towns slung into opioid stupor, 
social media-eroded hours, before orange alerts 
and orange tyrants, wars we couldn’t end, 
school lockdown shooting sprees,  

fire seasons that would parch the west, 
hurricanes that would steal cities—the list is long, 
Y2K, do you think you can stay up late enough?
Did you see it all coming in your lines of legacy code,

how the unraveling would be so slow we might 
just miss it, doom-scrolling and doordashing,
rage-tweeting, masked and shutdown, 20/20, right
into a pandemic no one thought to be scared of?

I walked through a Midwest neighborhood 
that last night—did we ever firmly agree
when the century officially ended and began?—
saw families in lawn chairs in their stockpiled

garages with coolers of beer casually rooting 
for the ruins. If this was the apocalypse
they would go down quietly with hot wings 
by the light of a mini antenna tv. Pitched toward 

the futurama of flying cars and space pods and 
freeze-dried meals, you offered up this Frankenstein 
ruse at the rise of big tech, where we would 
count down, zone by zone and some invisible binding 

that held us would let go. I miss that 
teenage melodrama, the metallic-painted amateur hour 
you gathered the world around and did nothing 
but usher us into the continuation of the story, 

and when you died down and time was revealed 
to be a construct that wouldn’t kill us, we resumed 
living toward all the other things that would. 
That night hospitals gave whistles to their patients 

just in case the call-bells failed to ring nurses.
Y2K, I think we might be blowing them decades
too late and it turns out that we can’t hear
a cry for help the way we used to.

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Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of four poetry collections: Foxlogic, Fireweed (Backwaters Press/Univ. of Nebraska), Little Spells, James Laughlin Award-winner How to Live on Bread and Music, and Salt Memory. The collaborative chapbook, Dear Question, with L.I. Henley, was published in late 2024 from Glass Lyre Press. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, she teaches poetry at University of Redlands in California.

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