Selected Works, John Bradley

 

On Being Struck by a Conjunction Traveling at the Speed of Ignorance

If you told me that I literally had to eat poop every single day and I would look younger, 

I might.  I just might.

    –Kim Kardashian

I’m pretty certain I would.  No, I know I would

eat poop at least once a day—if you told me

all guns would decompose into rock salt

and burr.  All the plastic in the ocean would turn 

into krill, kelp, coral song, tufted rain.  I would gladly

eat my poop.  And yours.  And yours.

If you told me Putin would become a baby

tarantula under a rock on the sleepy soil of Siberia

to be eaten by a larger tarantula.  I would.

You would.  We would eat Putin’s poop right now  

without plutonium bacon.  If you told me there 

would never be war of any kind, not with missile, 

bomb, bullet, kiss.  I would eat Kim Kardashian’s

literal poop.  If you told me the planet grows younger, 

ever younger.  O Lord, I’d eat your waste, too.

Circumstantial Evidence

The small silver crucifix bearing traces of Drano.

The two-hundred-fifty pound biography of J. Edgar Hoover, its pages bearing teeth marks.

The parrot who endlessly recites Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody! 

Who the hell are you?” to a revolver at the bottom of its cage.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg digging their own graves on the White House lawn.

Frida Kahlo’s back massaged with a smooth wooden spoon by her spider monkey.

The handwritten note in the margin of a collection of Sappho: Language is always a modality of desire.

Specks of lipstick from the lips of Marilyn Monroe clinging to a toothpick inside an unmarked white envelope.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg digging up Crazy Horse’s unmarked grave.

A thread of blood zigzagging across the clear glass dinner plate forming the words: Paper fan.

You shadow me

1.

You shadow me far enough behind to be my brother, but never close enough so I can ask.  Did you ever finish that book about Houdini in the next life writing on the bathroom mirror with a bar of soap a message to his wife in the bathtub, hands dangling over the side?  All these purple paper clips in my pocket—I have to get them back in dad’s desk drawer before I can sleep.  I draw maps of tongues, all sizes and shapes, the intersection of pronunciation and future income.  Your brown brogans, two sizes too big, you stuff with newspaper in the toes, which makes them go squish, squish.  When I open dad’s desk, there’s that small drawer I can’t find the key to that you once told me you opened with a black Lab’s incisor.  

2.

I draw maps of dragonflies trapped inside a donkey’s bladder.  

3.

Something’s humming in here.  Can you hear it? I say to my mother, who slips into the room just as I sidle away from the desk.  I once won a medal, busy with bronze bumps, which I lost long ago, for drawing a map while blindfolded of a mountain range that melted into black licorice.  If you look up at the sky and a raindrop—traveling at speeds only a liquid crow can know—passes through your pupil, it will take eons before it arrives at the point of departure.  A car pulls off the road and comes to a skidding stop, the driver scribbling on his hand a word made of circles and squares.  If I get out the frying pan and start scrambling some eggs, sprinkling on top some chopped black olives and feta, please, sit at the table with me for a bit.  

4.

Pretend you want to stay.  You want to say: To linger in the lilt of the tongue.  When I get out of bed, I know what I’ll find in my pocket—a map of long fingers stuffed with cow nipples and red silk.  Downstairs someone’s going squish, squish. 

5.

You know I’ll do most anything in defense of the sleepless tongue.  

Sleep for Rent

Though it’s already morning, I need somewhere to lie

this heavy body down.  There’s a wooden sign 

on the nearby yellow house that reads: SLEEP 

FOR RENT.   I knock on the door and a sullen woman 

appears.  I tell her of my need.  She pauses, pushes 

the door open wider, turns, and I follow.  She leads me 

to her garage, the open side door.  You’ll have to pay, 

she says, as if testing me, for last night.  I’m so tired 

I agree.  She points to the beds with her chin and murmurs, 

You can have the one with the crib railing.  I look around.  

What she calls a bed is a blanket, folded lengthwise 

in half, spread out on the concrete floor, with a pillow.  

There are two rows of these so-called beds, three feet 

apart.  Unsure of which bed she means, I wander 

amongst them.  A few renters stroll off into the morning 

glare, having had their fill of sleep.  I want a bed away 

from the door, away from the light, but I notice something 

has been scattered over several of the blankets—dried brown 

pellets.  They look like cat food, though I see no cat about.  

I end up back near the door and find the bed I’ve avoided 

has no brown pellets strewn across the blanket.  Then I see 

a wooden railing, broken from playpen or crib, leaning against 

the garage wall.  This must be the bed the landlady told me 

to take.  I lie down on the blanket, the concrete floor 

pressing hard, the sun boiling in the window, burning 

through my eyelids, through my jellied eyes, 

to the brain’s pulsing core.   There’s nothing to do 

but lie still and mutter: Morpheus, come find me, 

hold me in your long, bony arms.

The Eclipse of Uncertainty

Q. What exactly are killer robots?

A. The fear of snare drum, bell, glockenspiel, marimba, cymbal, gong.

Q. Why are autonomous weapons so attractive?

A. It has been found that binoculars from New Jersey may alter the skyline of Hong Kong.

Q. Is there anything morally wrong with deploying a killer robot in war?

A. I was falling into a trumpet just before the last act, while you were singing inside my splendid belly.

Q. Could a robot ever act morally?

A. I never encountered Margot in orange-gone-green language slippers.

Q. What if autonomous weapons could be perfect?

A. Pieces of Irish Catholic clothing in the bottle of wine perplexed everyone on the living room floor, which undid the magnetic seal.

Q. Would deploying killer robots be unfair?

A. A person someone buried in the south of France could not stop saying: Even a feather or an avocado pit targeted for amnesia must nap.

Q. Could deploying killer robots make war too easy?

A. I tend to eat the texts I don’t agree with to prevent unfleshed people from nibbling my wings.

Q. What exactly are killer robots?

A. I see two small insect-like children nested in my body, said Julius Caesar, with a slight touch of vibrato.

Q. What happens now?

A. Never play a dirty valveless horn while burning Dallas or Berlin.

On the Finding of Fecal Pellets in a Stargazer’s Braincase

I am not in control of my father 

lurking in the bathroom shower, waiting 

to pounce on whoever enters 

with abalone eyes.  It’s hard to push 

a few silent words out of the Andes

flying out of Indiana.  I could hear Gene 

Kelly in the kitchen eaten slowly 

by 17-century French DNA.

I do not own Greenland, though I do 

wear red shoelaces retrieved from the Adam 

Eve Amusement Park.  Even my mother 

claims she saw Catherine Deneuve 

with a trace of Ernest Hemingway

on her upper lip.  I cannot control the soft, 

glowing, rectangular eggs in your 1975 

canary yellow Volkswagen van.

Holes forming in Australia.  Stargazer

ash stashed in the freezer.  A crow 

(that once lived in Borges’ armpit) sleeping 

in the mailbox.  I just paint the lightbulbs

whatever blue they tell me to, blue

shoe soles as the earthworms pass below.

In Some Localities It Is Still Illegal to Fly Out of Your Body

Someone loiters over a flattened hat (or is it a kidney?) lying in the street and photographs it with a wallet-size photo.

While the spheres—smelling of migrating rain—never pause in their work, eating the air.

Really.  I’m only telling you this because I know some obnoxious poet with speakers mounted on his car will be driving by your house tonight loudly reciting “There Is No Bodily Form That I Cannot and Will Not Escape.” 

While a man in a silver raincoat goes door to door selling lightly used cars once owned by celebrated celebrities.  Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo.  And Francesca Carbonata, the Venice Beach surfer with the butt implants.

While a shout, injected with sleep, gives birth to another shout.

While you mistake me in Athens, Ohio, for a mail carrier from Des Moines who was prosecuted for taking a bite of a cello.  Near an oily black pool.

The spheres—engulfing a gray pickup truck disguised as a gray pickup truck—never pause.

A room full of teeth my mother cleanses, with a Q-tip dipped in baby oil, an eyeless face carved into a petrified ham sandwich.  

So in the southwest corner of the basement someone is holding a match, trying to ignite a glass of milk while blindfolded.  The cold in the concrete floor creeping into the bare feet.    

While the spheres—translating tight little bags of netted rain into rain—never pause.

Really.  I go about carrying a hollow Bible, once owned by Henri Rosseau, filled with fire ants which keep spelling the word PALPITATE.  Finger, hand, head, eyeball, cup.

While visible wavelengths—stiletto red, stiletto blue—eradicate a pair of eyeglasses dipped in honey and doused in a spill of sugar.  In a spill housed in a finger.  Hand.  Head.  Eyeball.  Cup.

Letters to Infinity

I wrote a letter to the moon with breast milk and arsenic.

I wrote a letter to the teeth of Paul Celan with an icicle dipped in solar salt. 

I wrote a letter to Joan Baez, asking her if we were married during the year I was living inside a wandering mailbox.

I wrote a letter to the KKK asking them if it was true that they were the Kalamazoo Kosmic Klezmer band.

I wrote a letter to Dorothea Lange’s camera, describing the diagram Euclid drew of a tongue intersecting a wet plum.

I wrote a letter to Laika, the Soviet space dog, but it was delivered to a tiny snail shell.

I wrote a letter to the moon using a crow feather dipped in the Gobi.

I wrote a letter to the Tower of Babel, but it was delivered to a stolen white tuba.

I wrote a letter to a murmuring mound that moves from place to place one grain at a time.  

I wrote a letter to Machu Picchu, using only the words further and flutter and farther.

I wrote a letter to Thomas Merton, each word tied by a thread to the breeze made by a bee’s wing.

I wrote a letter to Covid-19, but it had to be burned thirty-nine times, the ash cauterized.

I wrote a letter to the Eiffel Tower, but it was delivered to a warehouse of untranslatable faces.

I wrote a letter to the pomegranate on the kitchen counter, too gnarled and brown to be broken open to eat those juicy red carpet tacks.

I wrote a letter to my father falling from the night sky; he’s trying to read the Gospel of the Asterisk by flashlight as he’s falling, sand leaking from his left boot.

I wrote a letter to my baby teeth, but when I placed my ear to the envelope, I heard someone tossing dice into a hot frying pan.

I wrote a letter to the day I was born, which wrote a letter to the day the alphabet will be devoured by a poisoned armadillo.

I wrote a letter to Fulang Chang, Frida Kahlo’s naughty pet monkey; the letter smelled of a fish in the pocket of an asbestos raincoat.

I wrote a letter to Herbert Hoover, or was it J. Edgar Hoover, asking how to boil the weevils out of the Book of Infested Insomnia.

I wrote a letter to Elizabeth Bishop’s toucan, Uncle Sam, using smoke from Krakatoa.

I wrote a letter to Lorine Niedecker, cutting small squares and triangles from a leaf throbbing with liquid light.

I wrote a letter to the moon, which wrote a letter to the back of my head, saying: Tell me long and slow in Sumerian everything you owe.

Nine Things to Do If You Dream of an Immediate Rat

1. 

Draw a square around your eye.  Thicken

the wall but for one small hole.  Let the letter 

“L” glow in its lowly, lovely lair.

2.  

Someone in Istanbul is using a credit card bearing 

your name.  You bought a statue of a shark springing 

from the back of a woman with a faulty valve.

3. 

Hold tightly in your left hand a spoon.  When it falls, 

your will be clutching a violin—or is it a scrub brush—

in the Upper Volta.  Swallow only when the bell allows. 

4.

Shimmering red, apostolic green.  An iguana breathes 

when you breathe.  Your left foot, no, the right 

half of your tongue, it’s begun to swell.

5. 

Rub your face with an unpeeled onion.  Then try 

to pry from the wall the shadow of a mammal 

eating with a group of mammals a molten star. 

6.

Be gentle to the arsonist’s charred kidney.  The WWI 

soldier hiding in a jam jar.  Be kind, whenever you can,

to the bottle of fox urine in the medicine cabinet.

7.

Draw a crown around the downed crow.  Erase 

your fingerprints from the moon.  Now.  Note:

Someone replaced the sandstone eyes.   

8.

Yes, an eel can slip into your leather knife pouch.

If you should exhale through a frozen green 

pea.  The letter “L” palpitating loudly.

9.

If rain was a word, it would rain.  If rat was a riddle, 

you would dream the flicker of a tongue.  And wonder

if it was your own.

John Bradley's poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Calibanonline, Diagram, Hotel Amerika, Lake Effect, Otoliths, Pedestal, Sulfur Surrealist Jungle, SurVision, and other journals.  His most recent book is Hotel Montparnasse: Letters to Cesar Vallejo (Dos Madres Press) a verse novel.  He first encountered the poetry of Cesar Vallejo in Thomas Merton's Emblems of a Season of Fury and became further fascinated with his work while reading Poemas Humanos / Human Poems (Grove Press, 1968), translated by Clayton Eshleman (Eshleman's first book-length translation of Vallejo).  Bradley's admiration of Vallejo's poetry led, many years later, to the writing of Hotel Montparnasse, the hotel where Vallejo finds himself confined after his death.  The recipient of two NEA Fellowships in Poetry and a Pushcart prize, Bradley is a frequent reviewer of books for Rain Taxi.  Currently, he's a poetry editor for Cider Press Review and editing an international anthology of poetry on the war in Ukraine.