John Bradley


The Moon Is the Original Transmitter


Let me assure you that it wasn’t your lover who, after cutting off the toes, sewed all your socks together. Believe me, I would never assert that this carpet tack was removed from a badger’s beating heart, but it is true that Willie sold me, from his car trunk, on a Saturday morning at 11:37, a fragment from the bullet that battered Lincoln’s cranium. They say Putin soaks his prostate each morning in radioactive bath salts while he studies the military exploits of Xerxes. Yes, an acquaintance or two of mine will tell you they felt slightly dizzy at the sight of mushrooms glowing below the glass tiles in my kitchen floor. My mother, who I speak with via morse code, tapping on a bottle of olive oil with an electromagnetized spoon, instructs me to place my shoes each night in the oven, set at 450, to sterilize them. At a sanctuary in Samarkand, they keep a finger from the Buddha’s hand in a steel box that they open once a year, on April 20, Hitler’s birthday, to neutralize the impure celestial particles that surround us, residing even in an ambient ampersand. While soaking for three hours in your mud bath, repeat the following: I will not think of a white bear in a barber chair, I will not think of a white bear . . . . You won’t believe me, my mother told me recently, but you were conjured by a surgeon in Dublin with bad breath, who would ramble on and on about some WWI pigeon named Cher Ami. You may have already heard about the portal that opens every twenty-nine days behind the wall clock at a bikers’ bakery in Cleveland, but I would never advise you appearing there unless wearing a seaweed-woven raincoat, and accompanied by a toothbrush with steel bristles.



(Further Evidence of) Spontaneous Mummification


               The woman who plays harmonica with a tarantula in her mouth, who will tell you, each time you ask, The human skeleton has too many bones.

               The ants eating a white plastic fork, without ever asking the white plastic fork, What color is the black Tin Lizzie Henry Ford was buried in?

               The NSA contractor, who falls asleep at 3:43:02 a.m., who wakes at 3:43:29 to find the steel door to the Operation Center a throbbing artichoke.

               The judge who uses a sock puppet to instruct the jury, the jury that replies by rapidly blinking their eyes.

               The Secretary of Aliens Amongst Us, who will eat not of terrestrial flesh, but only of fibrous growth, cultivated on a silk suit painted the color of the mummified sky.

               The Professor of the Literature of Opioid Addiction who tells the class, Paint a picture of Wrigley Field as an intergalactic vehicle on the last day.

               The pancake in the IHOP that sprouts eyes, which track the toads gathering on the ceiling, which gaze upon the upside-down glass of water near the pancaked plate.

               The electronic device at the meeting that sometimes asks to be called I-am-your-good-friend Bob, and other times How-can-anyone-not-like-a-tube-sock.

               The cactus juggler, and part-time avian linguist, who stops to eat a cotton ball whenever an airborne cactus says, It takes a sutured eye to see the sutured moon.

               The buff hen, without a visible head, who wanders the hallway murmuring, I am that which knoweth not the word.

               The president who looks into his presidential mouth mirror and spies on his blistered tongue a portrait of the president, with a portrait of the president on his blistered tongue.

               The buff hen, still without a head, who murmurs, Whereupon thy left hand shall mightily smite thee even as thy righteous brain proclaims: This too is true.



Zero Rarely Occurs: ChatGBT Interview with Vladimir V. Putin

Q. Should it begin to rain under your skin, will you wrap your tongue in satin?
A. Once I am a circle, I will be a square in the shape of a gathering spiral.

Q. When you look under the photos of your fingers, do you hear a recording of rain in the upper lungs of the moon?
A. I was thrilled to see a small Hungarian lake in Norway rise up on its hind legs, gently enraged.

Q. What would you say to a bag of Thursday afternoon rain?
A. I’m three-fifths of a minute away at all times from the verb that forms internal genitalia.

Q. And if it’s true that cashmere rain can make you anemic?
A. Peel the skin from an umbrella and you’ll uncover another umbrella, tinged with purple.

Q. What sound do you make when the firing squad takes aim in the rain at the whipped butter?
A. Women disappear every day in the forests of Shostakovich.

Q. Rain can kerosene the tongue, so why the need for metallic shoelaces?
A. In Istanbul, I had to replace a malingering stomach with a wood burning stove.

Q. With rain-soaked teeth?
A. I could vanish you, vanish your world from your spinal parenthesis.

Q. And should the alphabetic rain swell your elbow? And you begin to smell of cinnamon sewn into the lining of a raincoat from 1948?
A. Let’s just say I adore, condemn, imprison, nibble, boiling, silence.

Q. With rain-soaked teeth?
A. I’ve buried a spleen in Idaho, and now Lisbon is diagnosed with ghosts.

Q. And when the rain says: I want to do love with you where zero rarely occurs?
A. Garbage bags full of Dostoyevsky’s feral light.

Q. Is there something you’re not telling us about those missing 1,936 mouthfuls of rain?
A. Self-flagellating hummingbirds pulsate the retina.



After Disembarking the Eel, I Cool Down with a Glass of Bashō


You can buy a crate of undiluted silence at Costco, but you need a forklift to move it. In Space City, a sign over the entrance says: Anything you say may be probed for stray microbes of cosmic time. We hunted all night for your icy legs, searching every alley, dumpster, and abandoned guitar case.

Leonardo once attached a bat’s wings to a poisoned apple and called it an affliction delivery system. Every time she said whetstone, it rained in Kansas. In the photo tucked in the back of How to Do Nothing, I’m shaking hands with Federico Garcia Lorca, who’s wearing gloves made of green swan feathers.

Microphones crawl after those who smell of tabasco sauce or gorilla glue. I said the word disrupt and each button on my shirt blossomed into an iridescent hummingbird heart. The only way to tell if the Jean-Michael Basquiat painting was authentic was to take a bite out of a corner of the canvas and let the paint linger on the tongue.

The raspy voice of the lost umbrella, I hear it every time I enter the hallway, and then the sound wisps away as I step out into the rain. I said I ate the baked tongue of Albrecht Dürer, and the mushroom soup bubbled and overflowed the brim of the bowl. Just one swig of Commander Cody’s Melodious Cough Syrup and every fable you’ll ever utter shall flutter through the cosmos for millennia.

We consoled the damaged pastries by melting the cello and the sump pump. That bog man in the coat closet said he wouldn’t leave until the house had been converted into a performance center for gifted and talented frogs. After I recited the Pledge of Allegiance to Alpha Centauri, each pile of dirt went quiet.



Written in Cranial Ink


Unable to withstand the moon’s quicksilver voice, I gently pour it into your ear.

*
Wet the ground before you extract the song.

*
Her fingers made like scissors and the cloud made like steel wool.

*
I would break the back of any fool that broke the sky. But would I break the sky that broke your back?

*
The book keeps opening to the passage: I can smell your smokey hands, about to spontaneously combust.

*
Let the lake waver over your reddened eyes until you can see the bottom of the lake.

*
I walked for a long time, exhausted, and then one day I noticed: on my back, an obese turtle.

*
You don’t choose the tree that collapses on your skull; the tree, my friend, chooses you.

*
But, say my all-too-obedient eyes, we can only see the colors we’ve been instructed to see.

*
If you don’t mind, I’ll administer the lie detector test to each of your vowels.

*
As I watched, Leslie grew a second thumb, adjacent to her pinkie, held it up, and said, Now will you let me remove that crab lodged in your liver?

*
The book keeps opening to the passage: So don’t be surprised if you find me asleep in your navel.

*
I made a copy of you out of fallen leaves, my love, should you ever tumble-flutter-fly apart.

*
On his deathbed, Tu Fu was told by a local woodcutter, You’ve been dreaming for so long. Now you’re beginning to wake.



Ars Poetica


I.
There will be chairs that sound like music breaking from a lair, and music that will sound like the bursting of ice-coated chairs.

II.
Each time an ant taps the side of a mountain, its brain proclaims: This too is the kingdom of the ant.

III.
Right now someone wearing a white lab coat and rabbit ears injects vibratory earth into a steaming violin.

IV.
I am all the time slippery, unborn, says a Lorca moon (bearing teeth marks as if someone had found it briefly edible).

V.
Measure your left and right nostrils and compare; then tell us what the Angel of Symmetry did to the pomegranate tree.

VI.
A square sun has no fear of a serrated cloud. A square bird reads not the Guide to Ambulatory Statuary Restoration.

VII.
A sleepy butcher clutching a French horn will not hover silently over the library for long.

VIII.
Children with lead poured into their feet cannot grow fins.

IX.
A centipede, slinking along the polished flesh of Venus de Milo, swears it could never fall into the open mouth of the sky.

X.
Trust not the stomach that digests iron pellets nor the elixir prescribed for you by two pianos grazing in a stationary field.

XI.
Let each hair fly finally free from your body, says the naked mole rat in a Goodwill fur coat.

XII.
You dine on reheated starlight and rehydrated silence in a bare room. While your clone eats verb-shards from the Trojan War. Eats a slice of paradise tugged from the stomach of a starfish lifted from your obituary.



John Bradley's most recent book is Dear Morpheus, The Glue That Is You (Dos Madres Press). He is a poetry editor for Cider Press Review.

 
 

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