John Bradley :: Six poems

How to Make an Artificial Semicolon

The semicolon in the eye socket, a guilty pleasure, starts in the 1800s.
As Cecilia writes, Anyone can marry their ocularist.
You’re just making a thin shell to show everything breaches together. 

As Cecelia writes: So my artificial bachelor degree is scary. 
When it comes to the future of the past and the present of the future,

              use red threads.
Your misunderstood morning shape appears as Kurt Vonnegut. 

As Cecilia writes, I’m Italian even after breakfast.
You can also break the miniscule veins with a pause.
But humans—and I don’t blame you—can accidentally become a knife. 

According to the cure, replace the eyelids every five years.
Replace your stepfather in Fresno every five years.
Replace Theodor Adorno with friendly, terrible Jell-O. 

You will find purple irises, a drooping mustache, an espresso,

              and a diamond in the pancake batter.
Anyone can look up and see the semicolon in your eye socket.
As Cecilia writes, I don’t remember the French.

 

 

How to Shake Off Your Face

I spent hours.  Mostly.  The lip and tongue.
There were reasons.  In any language.
Pain, syntactic; fear, alongside; love, whether pleasure. 

110.  A full moon will do this.

The first time the face in stretchy T-shirt material.
I noticed America disguised in Maine, I saw. 

37.  Some bad sentences.

Silence, using only a hotel restaurant.  (Stab with a fork.)
Later, in Italy, my father connected to be born.
Like me, I saw more than I already did. 

64.  Membrane surrounding the brain.

Then, until I was 80 percent, I received messages.
Throw away.  If you don’t have, I’m sorry, if you have any.
One way: a face on the floor.  Try it.  After a while. 

121. Have guests over.  (In any language.)
48.  A as in Arles.
102.  Kinda sorta. 

Wordlessly.  You moved back and forth between the living.
Moving English into your hands.  Embedded in strangers. 

84. Bitter.  (A full moon will do this.)

You might, in a well, simultaneously, opening your eyes.
In all seasons.  The lip and tongue.  Wordlessly.

 

 

How to Interview a Plain-Spoken Mirror

Your knobby knees say, Some of us are born with the imposture

syndrome.  This urge—pay attention between moments to this
couple-of-seconds urge.  Look for pleasure stains on a random 

Thursday—online or in your person.  For instance, all my uncomplicated

buttons work, Frank O’Hara.  A version of yourself in that photo
of your mother at the Montreal art gallery.  I stopped going to the scaffold 

with the backlit pale mint ghost.  Dumb.  I’m worthy, Daphne du Maurier, 

of laundry, parents, balsamic, Wanda.  If you can look in the mirror
for several days and think: Tragicomic or charming.  Your father 

in the unmoored seated position, with his homesick chin.  Don’t worry

if you can read Frank O’Hara’s small, meaningful teeth.  You’re chasing
a health-food store, a pencil, a hedge fund, coffee shop death.  You can 

look.  Some of us are born wood, some metal, some at the Dress for Success

in Queens.  If your feet hurt, the humming bagel seed can help you be
divine, dear friend.  All my uncomplicated buttons.  Say it over and over 

to dear Frank O’Hara: The future is lazy and untrue.  But I can’t stop.

 

 

How to Soundproof an Ocean Wave

Maybe you’re a microscope, and you deserve light.  In Boston,
in Chicago.  I will hang drapery with absolutely no idea
how to hang drapery.  In a closed lab in New Jersey, I believe 

you can buy decades of fluorescent light.  Many of us
have been locked in air, concrete, America, bricks, comfort,
wood, dopamine, grief, ocean waves.  Delicately on my tongue, 

fragments, very small fragments.  That will never end.  Try
to get born in a third-floor apartment in this world
and, at the same time, in a chip of infinity.  My whole forearm 

disappearing in memory nodes.  Before the plague, I watched
faces.   In Chicago, in Boston.  In useless TV shows.  I watched
neighbors with low frequencies, gangs of the elderly crossing 

the outside world.  I watched, a self-soothing pharaoh,
silver and shining.  Locked in a controlled stretch of time,
with slipped-sideways joy.  Above all, part of an eternal 

rhythm, spreading through packed molecules.  Your whole
forearm.  Disappearing.  Into what’s left.  Nice to see you,
fragments.  Such calm, Proustian fragments.  Join me, every 

twelve seconds.  Delicately on my tongue.  Within your
existing question, dopamine.  Wood.  Grief.  Bricks.
Comfort.  Ocean waves disappearing into your mouth.

  

 

How to Scatter Cremated Martian Remains

As I grew up, ashes fell on my shoes.  The gentle to-and-fro
to a distant place onto my back.  My muscles loosen; 

the clouds loosen.  You were such a cute Martian, says Ani

DiFranco, 100 yards from my VW van.  It helps to sway
in a rocking chair, out of public view.  I recognize your GPS 

coordinates, your sweet, sweet rhythmic sway.  I’ll probably

make you cough, says Jewel.  I suppose it’s true—you’re
the only Martian on Xanax at Lilith Fair.  Ashes fall 

on the drowsy toddler.  Say a prayer, a looking-forward-to-

a-sleep-inducing-porch-swing-psalm.  I meditate in a hammock
until 3 or 4 o’clock.  Those crab cakes probably won’t kill you, 

say my parents, in a trancelike state, like Nevada.  If you’re

unsure, fall awkwardly close to close friends.  Ashes fall on your
Current Biology.  On a large boulder, a trowel, a cool tank top, 

a spoon, a closure, a ladle, a stillness, a hammock, a VW van.

In a supine position, I produce about five pounds of black-light
fragments.  Because I’ve seen you, whispering to a mid-30s 

Martian (Hi, I’m 80 percent David) on the train.  Words like quirky

and biodegradable in its powdery hands.  Sterile and safe
to touch, you say.  Making you dizzy on the way home. 

 

 

How to Hang Laundry on Strangers

A furtive twirl, twists and flinches.  I can imagine myself
in your underwear, exposed to the sun.  Speak local English
in the laundromat, then melt away entirely.  In Venezuela, 

the morning takes eight minutes longer.  I have no obligation
to your chair, your electricity, your unraveling.  Never deny
me my birthplace, my ever-changing faces.  I’m Italian 

in front of the television, says Geneva.  Risi and bisi.
I want you in my leather chair, on CNN, with peas
and zucchini.  I have no obligation to cross breezes 

and sweaty sea.  Someone other than myself will shrink
in bed in the rain.  I’m Italian in Regent’s Park, says Geneva. 
What I can do to your refrigerator and your French boys.  

A big house kept coming back to Portland for more bodies.
Everywhere I went, concrete calls for another.  Mirror
and deflect, I tell Geneva in Toronto.  Then melt away 

entirely.  I have no obligation to faster or smaller.  I think
of Stanley Tucci in Venezuela, Sunday night in my leather
chair.  Another pinch, Geneva, of modernist spuma.

 

 

 

John Bradley’s poetry has appeared in Alligatorzine, Bitter Oleander Review, Hotel Amerika, Lotus-eater, Otoliths, Sulfur Surrealist Jungle, SurVision and other journals. He frequently reviews books of poetry for Rain Taxi.