Premonition That a Head Will Take the Shape of a Spellbound Bird
When a spell enters the mouth, three strands of sea-green
silk go flying over the ocean. It could be noted they smell
like a pickle left on a plate before a blindfolded surgeon.
Thrumming and humming, the silk strands melt above
the White Sands Desert. When a spell enters the mouth,
at the edge of the cosmos, I know I’ll never need
another paper cello lit from within. Though one day
a postage stamp will choke a hummingbird and no one
will be there to witness the fish bowl where a heart
with fins and gills swims in circles. When a spell enters
the mouth, that red metal toolbox you found in the cornfield
won’t unlock. Because a spell can’t be tricked, rubbed,
licked, robbed, kissed, caged, killed, swallowed. Because
in the oven, it never rains, even when it rains. Because
upstairs, even now, Adolf Eichmann feeds a sugar cookie
to his pet rat. But the storied tongue: it flits, flutters, forgets
everything it’s told us. Even as the spell—as if foretold—
through the body unfolds.
For the Vortex Napping in the Attic
So I ran to Kazakhstan with a loose octopus that crawled
into someone’s cornea and said, Talk to me as if something
you want is trying to kill you. Each summer, Lenin and Stalin
flirt with a medieval monk with live coals cocooning
in his long, undulating beard. As it so happens, I was
conjuring an antswarm in an old mattress that once
crossed the Alps. When I look up, I see a man with delicate
ankles inside a coagulation of crows floating away. A friend
of mine, trapped in the bathroom for twenty-two years,
said, I crave a mountain painted with birds, or else birds painted
on a knife. Hovering around your face, a drowsy shark
from the Lewis and Clark expedition said: I’m afraid your earhole
still needs to breathe. As it so happens, I was taken to a circular
room to watch a lime trapezoid take flight from the back
of your skull. After I ate the bullet made of clay, my back
no longer ached. Each fall at the kitchen table, I inhale
the ashes of an elephant imprisoned for making love
to a hummingbird’s reflection.
John Bradley’s latest book of poetry is Dear Morpheus, The Glue That Is You (Dos Madres Press). He is the editor of And Blue Will Rise Over Yellow: An International Poetry Anthology for Ukraine (Kallisto Gaia Press). A frequent reviewer for Rain Taxi, he is currently a poetry editor for Cider Press Review.
Image: peta.org
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Heavy Feather Review 