John Bradley

(O): Six Sonnets for Novica Tadic


1.

Anne Frank squats over an open book.
A goldfish stirs the mud in a cranium.
Stalin’s grandson scrubs
his shadow’s shadow’s shadow.

O Novica. O Tadic.
O not quite invisible author.
O almost visible poem.
O most invisible reader.

Who can deny a poem without
breath, a ladder balanced
on the ass of a glass eye.

Someone with a potato for a head
speaks turnip to someone
with a beetle for a brain.


2.

Anne Frank wants out of this poem.
The goldfish wants out of its gill.
Stalin’s shadow’s shadow’s
shadow burns a hole in his retina.

O Tadic. O Novica.
How can a poet be
a poet with the devil’s
sputum in his mouth?

Should we talk Milosevic?
Talk Karadzic and Mladic?
Watch Serbia’s Got Talent?

Translate Tomaz Salamun into
doorknob stew, skull kinescope, cat
with a bird’s head.


3.

Poet zombies.
Construction worker zombies.
Hasidic Jew zombies.
Soccer mom zombies.

Only a sonnet can kill
a zombie. Though it would
also kill the living
and the unborn.

O Tadic, God is hungry.
You are hungrier.
You are angrier.

O God, Tadic is hungry.
Horny and happy
for a bowl of cold offal.


4.

Stalin’s grandson reads this poem.
Stalin reads every damn poem.
Hungry not for poetry
but for poets.

O Tadic, in this sonnet
ashes of Anne Frank’s
Frankenstein, made of barbed wire
and eggs and ashes.

Should we talk about the death
of the poem? The absence of silence?
Those little bells on your slippers?

“Monster” meaning
one who stirs moon milk moan
with the femur of a flea.


5.

To wake up with a potato
hole for a mouth and little potatoes
falling out of the potato-
making cavern.

The fork said to the heart
I’d rather be a spoon than a serpent
with a head for a tail
slithering inside some sonnet.

Where the word fevers.
Where it yellows and purples.
Where it shits hair and tooth.

Fattened and flattered.
O Tadic. The word spreads
its shapelessness across the moon.


6.

O the last sonnet will begin
with an O and end with a someone
who looks like Anne Frank
pushing a radioactive mop.

A poet is a worker and not
a worker. A poet is an imbecile
on meds who appears smarter
so much smarter when dead.

Anne Frank will not read this.
Stalin will read this and fart.
The moon will bleed through its pores.

O Tadic, the moon bleeds its gills.
Stalin drinks his grandson’s urine.
Anne Frank scrubs the under floor.

**

return to sawbuck 4.3

**
John Bradley is the author of War on Words (BlazeVOX) and Terrestrial Music (Curbstone). A collection of his prose poems, You Dont' Know What You Don't Know, is forthcoming from the Cleveland St. Univ. Poetry Center. He teaches at Northern Illinois University.