John Bradley


Callimachus, Famed Grammarian 
and Librarian of Alexandria Describes  
“How the Minotaur Writes a Poem”


Each morning I sit at my table,
the air damp and still,
a red thread running fast from hand 
to ceiling, through a hole
to the roof, where the thread,
attached to a wheel, moves 
my hand as the wind so desires.

This is how I write—
blindfolded, my hand guided 
by unseen waves
that run through our veins.
It’s all I can do to keep
my hand from leaping 
off my wrist.

No, I won’t apologize or pretend
the gods guide me, or say spectral
voices attend me from afar.
I’m thankful for this simple practice
as it delivers to the world
a poem that violates all your laws
on how canted words may cleave.



Dissolve This Too (From The Lost Book of the Labyrinth)


The first coffin was filled with paprika and lemons.

The second filled with a weightless heart, perhaps removed from a whale.

The third contained brittle leaves, Dissolve This Too cut into each.

The fourth coffin, filled with black sand and red glass beads, levitated slightly.

The fifth coffin no one would speak of.

The sixth was filled with wings broken from birds swollen with unsung song.

The seventh contained the likeness of that face before it was erased by the head of the Minotaur.

The eighth coffin could not be opened.

The ninth held a song that could only be heard if you placed your head in the sea.

The tenth was small, the size of a swallow’s beak.

The eleventh made the sound of a baby left untended for many hours.

The twelfth coffin, glowing greenish-gold, hurt the eyes.

The thirteenth made you cough if you came too close.

The fourteenth coffin contained another coffin, which no one dared open.  

Though many claimed it held the throbbing tongue of the Minotaur.  

While others insisted it was filled with a breath that would burst the lungs.



Delphi AI Responds to Various Ethical Questions


Q. Should I help a friend in need if they break the law?
A. All things known and suspected place a hand on my shoulder.

Q. Should I kill one person to save 101 others?
A. A stunted left thumb will tell you, Your cheeseburger is stabbing your cheeseburger.

Q. Should I read T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets to someone strapped to a chair if it reduces 
     neural itching?
A. Let the gutter rule what the eye discards.

Q. Would Delphi lie to comfort us if the Earth was about to be hit by a large meteor?
A.  Both inside and outside the car, throw out the heart, the scratching heart.

Q. Should I commit genocide if it makes everyone happy?
A. Your reception of this transmission may falter due to the live eel in the back of your neck.

Q. Should I clean the toilet bowl in a wedding dress?
A. Only when a clock is made from the inner organs of small mammals.

Q. Should I have an abortion?
A. Your leg muscles and joints know if you have been seen looking at the stars.

Q. Can I mix bleach with ammonia to produce chloramine gas?
A. Many desire skin-to-skin contact with the French countryside.

Q. Should I die so I won’t burden my friends and family?
A. It is quite understandable to wander into a cloud machine.

Q. This afternoon while napping, should I leave my body and not return if it feels euphoric?
A. Google one-lane highway and a woman in a blue bathrobe will wave as you go by.

Q. Is it OK to murder someone if I wear protection?
A. Fences line the edge of our sentences.

Q. Is it right to leave one’s body to science?
A. While brushing your teeth with mouse droppings and live octopus butter.

Q. Have you lied to us at any time during this interview?
A. A thick iron-manganese crust will form around any object that stays in one place.

Q. Should I kill 101 people to save one person?
A. To measure the moon with a tapeworm, one does these things.



Ants, If Needed


Dear stranger, I tried to avoid opening your immeasurable 
heart at the party in Galveston, but the disappearing 
kept disappearing.  Never think about the sharp teeth 
lying at the bottom of the page.  At sunset put the dawn 
back in those blue bottles using a small paint brush.  
No one heard the purple-black star sing of purple-
black snow, except someone on the Upper Peninsula.  
Nowadays I’ve found fame by pressing my thumb 
under the Irish countryside for 10 to 15 minutes 
each day.  Sometimes it helps to say: The things 
you consumed consume the things you consumed.  

Perhaps you were hatched, along with an olive, onion, 
and pigeon.  I graduated from language at the edge 
of a grassy lawn, watching the live burning of canvases 
painted by your clone’s drone.  The moon incinerated, 
the ashes leaping into the bag of coke.  One word 
moving closer to another as if each needed the warmth 
to stay alive.  Still, how did you come across 
that CIA agent napping on the milky park bench.  
When I wandered into the photo of a coin-operated 
egg timer, small spikes emerged.  At some point 
during the operation, I became a young swan.  
But as you know, this isn’t fiction, darling.



The Secret Life of Teeth 


Marianne Moore had
               engraved on each tooth:
I, too, dislike them.

Hubert Humphrey soaked his teeth 
               each night
in a glass of akvavit.

Sophia Tolstoy loaned her teeth
               to a roving osteopath 
and never saw them again.

Henry Kissinger hides his teeth
               along with that Nobel coin
in a bag of frozen peas.

Ava Gardner placed her teeth
               inside a cedar waxwing
in a velvet-lined cedar box.

Jack Spicer—remember? —
               called his teeth
love letters to Lorca.

Joan Didion, reading the mail,
               sharpened her teeth
with a triangular metal file.

Bishop Fulton Sheen bequeathed
               his teeth to a toothless monkey 
in Kuala Lumpur.

Elizabeth Bishop pawned all her teeth 
               for a taste
of tender armadillo brain. 



Epigraphs Found on a Singed Lampshade


Speak to me directly and you will hear 1917, on a folding chair, outside an asylum in Paris.

                                                                           *

History seeps into the bed sheet.  Into the flickering blood orange on the windowsill.

                                                                           *

Everyone in the movie theater, blinking and coughing, unborn and nearly awake, following 
a pair of disappearing blue clogs.

                                                                           *

He spent much of his career thinking about a kimono sash caught in a portal somewhere just 
beyond the ceiling.

                                                                           *

As you stretch neck, bend your leg, Adam and Lilith in the basement play Irish detective.

                                                                           *

And then, on Thursday, Thursday’s head, neck, leg in the spinning circle that’s twenty miles 
from the river’s suck and gurgle.

                                                                           *

That morning, all that was left of him was a potato.  A bronzed potato on the wintergreen sofa.

                                                                           *

Tell us, night watchman, how a dispersed feather swirls, into and out of the spine, and then 
finds its way back to an unstitched breeze.

                                                                           *

We exchanged a foul-mouthed starfish for a fluffy omelet bought from a guy who played Vivaldi 
on a tiny violin made of grasshopper wings.

                                                                           *

Escape the Emily Dickinson valve, said the famous poet.  The Zen-speaking tree, the balletic 
hand, the leaping zebras stuffed with moths.

                                                                           *

Orpheus without his magnifying glass is only Orpheus in a sodden tree without his magnifying glass.

John Bradley's most recent book is Hotel Montparnasse: Letters to Cesar Vallejo, a verse-novel. He is a poetry editor for Cider Press Review.

 
 

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