John Bradley

3 poems

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Domesticated Monsters

In the driveway, the boy clutches the wheel of the sit mower, his mom tying the white blindfold around his eyes. My friend tells me his drinking buddy, the local sheriff, stabbed him in the shoulder repeatedly. He taps his shirt a couple of times, saying: “I have the ballad to prove it.” Outside the grocery store, a woman struggles to make her bicycle move. I pretend not to notice she has two flat tires. The chicken on the nature tour explains it sees me as predator, or roost, or chicken feed. I don’t tell it I just ate chicken nuggets behind the barn. I once had the honor of picking up the dry cleaning of a famous poet. When I brought it to her office she glared at me and said, "This better not end up in one of your poems.” Charlie Simic, you’re no monster. You purr every time we rub your furry ears.

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Citizen Celan,

This is the last such notice you will receive, as the possibility of a future cannot with any certainty be sorely sustained. We do not take delight in this, nor deny some small taste of balm. As with the cow with three udders for a heart, and a rooster for an eye, and a crow for an eye, Citizen Celan, we possess no intention of rending flesh from word, nor word from flesh, or some combination of the corporeally impossible. “A word--you know / a corpse,” you once wrote, intending neither to be funny nor unfunny, but somewhere in the chasm between. A dangerousness can be found in this chasm, Citizen Celan, in the cracks leading to and from. Those who have entered and those who have exited have never been delivered from this region, as with the cow caught in the colon, in clear violation of colon residency laws, yet retiring there as a cow in a colon will do. Some things must be stored, some ravaged, some broken into smaller and smaller breaks. As with the cow shattered into winged piglets, each more eyelid than wing. It is this breakage, Citizen Celan, this breakingness unto brokenness that should and should not trouble you. That is, the aggregated calmness and collision we refer to as you. You may not always know what has been done--or undone--in your name, Citizen Celan, but in your name it was done, thus making you complicit in it all. Though some might plea, with ears and eyes sealed, not guilty due to near total ignorance, as with the unlame cow with twenty-four chickens for a leg. It is allowable to laugh here, Citizen Celan, a small to middling laugh conceivable, and as it is permitted, therefore permissible. We find nothing more can or need be said. Thus ending and erasing whatever may reside or appear to respire here. As with the eyes of the deer inserted into the eyes of the cow, we reserve the right, at any time, without warning, to partially or fully revise you, our dearest Citizen Celan.

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From “Tranceluminations”


"But that’s not a poem,” she insisted. “It’s lime Jell-O cast in the shape of a skull.”


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The heart often asks the head, “Are you sure you’re not the rump?” And the head often asks the heart, “Are you sure you’re not a pulsating tumor?”


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It’s true; I salted this sentence so it couldn’t fly away.


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She looked up at the print of Van Gogh’s room in Arles, pointed to the tortured bed, and asked: “Is that where you sleep?”


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I use “and” in public and “&” with my lover, she said.


*

She was Elizabeth Peña and she was my bodyguard. My bodyguard who was shaving the wiry black hair in my groin with a straight razor. Only a bodyguard can be entrusted with a straight razor. Only Elizabeth Peña. Or Sigourney Weaver. Or Julie Christie. I had to chair a meeting at one p.m., and so I had to have a cleanly shaven groin. Without a cleanly shaven groin, I would never set foot inside a cherry picker. But then even with a hairy groin, I would not set foot inside a cherry picker. I first hired a bodyguard when I realized that the phone could ring and I could be in the bathtub, wiry hair sprouting out of my groinal region. Madonna asked if she could be my bodyguard, but I suspected she wanted to do it simply because her groin had already been shaven. When my bodyguard--why did she now look like Julia Child?--finished shaving me, she slowly wiped away the shaving cream with a towel, held the hand-mirror up to the newly denuded area, and raised her eyebrows. It was all I could do to keep from taking a black magic marker and making a taciturn black cloud to shelter my barren groin.

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After laughter or sex, the muscles in the face relax.


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Trancelumination: to look out the window and see yourself taking out the trash.


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The guy with the 12-pack of Miller Lite hears the Polish accent of the clerk and says to her, “Are you Polish?” “That’s an invasion of my privacy,” the clerk responds. “I was just curious,” he says. And she gives him a litany of things he could be curious about: the weather, the Cubs, the cost of stupidity. “My parents, they’re Polish . . ,” he offers in defense. The clerk continues to scold him. After he leaves, she tells me, “I didn’t mean to abuse him so.”

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O lowly aphorism, not prose, not poem, not aborted-novel. Just another belly button birthling.


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“You’re too old to be doing this shit,” Grace Slick wrote me. “On the other hand,” she added, “even skeletons have to have something to do.”


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Only after I got off the phone with my mother did I notice the charcoal smoldering in my side.


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These words may fluoresce if read on the Sea of Tranquility.


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But I prefer to speak in fuschia.


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return to sawbuck 5.2

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John Bradley's work has appeared in Ancora Imparo, In Posse Review, Lake Effect, Pemmican, Quarter After Eight, Verse Daily, and other journals. He is the author of War on Words (BlazeVox), Terrestrial Music (Curbstone), and most recently You Don't Know What You Don't Know (CSU Poetry Center). He teaches at Northern Illinois University.