J. Bradley
Forget About Our Jobs At The Record Store
My mustache is not conducive to twiddling,
palms unscathed of dangling your father’s
foreclosed home above your bodice
like a pair of left-handed scissors.
I want us to take turns treating everything
like train tracks, feed our rescuers
their own horses; they’ll never understand
how we flatten each other like pennies.
Daredevil
Our love is the shark, motorcycle tires
whirring above our backs, the clatter
of empty barrels when the landing fails.
I’m stealing Kirk Cameron’s sense
of monogamy, infusing a little
into each poem so the ones
that aren’t about you are played
by platonic stunt doubles;
I’ll teach them to brush the dust
away, try elsewhere.
Moonraker
When you changed the gravity
in me, I stopped hearing the need
for restraining orders within
love songs.
You exorcised the atmosphere
I held onto like a rosary, revised
my smile into something
that confounds mirrors, children.
Everything I want to say thaws,
ruins furniture and fillings.
December 2012
Our phones capture disheveled
hair, quilts, strawberries
on the chopping block,
the yawn of your kitchen.
As Simon & Garfunkel sing
of nuclear war over fresh granola,
I ask silently for someone
to discover our silhouettes.
You fill me with the helium
of Hallmark, but not its
inauthenticity.
J. Bradley is the author of the novella, Bodies Made of Smoke (HOUSEFIRE, 2012). He is the Web Editor of Monkeybicycle, the Falconer of Fiction at NAP, and runs the reading series There Will Be Words. Follow him on Twitter @iheartfailure or at iheartfailure.net.
Update 2019: J. Bradley is the author of Greetings from America: Letters from the Trade War (Whiskey Tit Books, 2019). His flash fiction piece, “How to Burn a Bridge Job Aid” was selected for Best Small Fictions 2019. He lives at jbradleywrites.com.
J. Bradley at There Will Be Words
Author photo credit: Laura Cole
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