Issue 19: <author name>

Bradstreet's Reply

                         When the mouth dies, who misses you?

                                                            —John Berryman

I

Why write me? This proposal a corpse

scabbed in verse, seduced

upon a desk, neither heaven nor divorce.

Why wed poetry? To comb its beard,

midwife a mind, wear some hoary name?

— The only miracle I know a page.

—Beginnings once blessed.

II

—Southern winter too warm to really die,

a sentimental poem this suicide.

—Art is imbalance, a forward slant,

life tucked in, straight as a rhyme:

kiss, seal, and submit. —Abandon?

—They say you waved, death’s brave clown.

—Great touch that lie.

III

But what luck this falling. Hell below,

unclothed angels above,

limbo a tepid form of soft porn.

—Silly boy, shaking like my eldest bird

gorged sick on berries. I held him close

while scolding. My body spoke:

you err and are loved.

IV

—Nests are prisons for the plucked, love

the most punishing form.

Even winged, Henry cannot feel.

—But flight survives —A merciless dream,

promising us the sky, bones light as lead,

always there, hovering over Henry,

a feathered gunman, still warm.

V

—Here you are, writing his death again.

—It was, but was not just.

—The pen always nudges a carcass,

ink always a thievery in blood.

We cannot explain the blade, holding Cain,

talking of paradise and shame,

mouths filling with dust.

VI

—We answered that broadside summons:

Ships sailing express!

Fertile plots! Make it New World!

Wild nights seeking wilderness! Pay with flesh.

Indenture the soul part-time! Suck lemons!

January’s mild! Never lose your hair!

—The gossiping elect.

VII

I have my own carping tongue,

my pen, my firearm.

I sight inside, fire into this dark

(that howling is also mine).

—The wild is a beast spreading its thighs.

I hear a wolf licking at my insides.

—The woods are without charm.

VIII

—Let it rise, your breast, lashed to heaven,

a fleshless thrill and thrall.

—Hell’s wordless blast. We cry

in speech, praise a curse, and all is burned.

Loss: to let just one slip into the pit.

Love: turning back to write it.

—Stench of verse done well.

IX

I follow through the library window,

though we are not one.

Books our bed, studied fellatios in prose,

so long as eyes are we. —Something else

here breathes. We know no one in poems.

—I kiss this paper, growing gray again.

This out, then done.

X

—Words could never nurse my sharp mouth,

a watch this wound

that time can’t heal. Unhand this malediction.

—A rotted heap of laurels, stench gagging

even the prayerful tongue. Senses choked,

the master wipes his lips. I’ll fetch a rag.

—I prefer a spoon.

XI

—Pinched in stained fingers, a gasp of smoke,

wilderness a cough

building inside you. –To hear a voice.

To smell tobacco wrapped in a word.

—I have felt this, returning to the wash,

sheet pinned tight into a perfect fold,

my English heart aloft.

XII

—I write to steal back life, to pare

down groping flesh,

cheating always towards death, this name

perfect for senseless notching.

The prison of a thousand fancies:

washerwoman, wife, pioneer,  

a woman’s sacred slouch.

XIII

A lark for youth, a ribbon for sickness,

beauty shaped like a fist.

—Opened in the promise of a kiss?

Pockmarks weaned me from such sin.

—But your carnal heart? I read the words.

—We love the part we cannot cure.

Survival means this.

XIV

—I exist: words controlled profess it.

—Life’s no final draft,

revise this body blessed to fall

or fly. —Someone sounding the horns again,

walls desiring dust, eyes darkness, bones a pit.

Count me among the ones

who did not trust.

XV

—In a tub, I find you, reading razors,

artist killing man.

I’ll play no wife or wet-lipped nurse.

Verse never the best part of man

or boy. Too much your own brimstone.

—Always a lover,

never a son.

XVI

—Fearing a mouth grown mild,

you scoured filth,

terrible darkness like water in your beard,

a steel lash knotted in your throat.

If only wickedness could digest

bile made stone.

Heady as a crucible.

XVII

Come wolves, the mind is a lamb,

its meekness your meat.

—Witness me devour this writing limb.

—The boy lies. —Then trades

his oeuvre for the barmaid’s number.

The idle work of a lifetime,

darling, this fanged feat:

XVIII

A brain on fire, a wild sycamore,

spit of pilgrim to bless

this unleavened seraphic loaf. Bake me a sin,

jaw me some jive, paint your face.

—How wearying.

—Holy moly, me sucks a milksicle.

—Hush Henry. Less.

XIX

Too little barb inside that scruff.

—How to translate this:

I whisper in the deity’s ear,

a prayer of wet hair sliding and a mole.

—We all fear being touched.

—We fear wandering, but mostly bliss.

—Yes, bliss.

XX

So much error in these hands. A bloody

child struggling.

Let the poem be good.

—I swear a woman kissed the keyhole dark,

choice thin as a blade, the poet

counting his cups to cure the shakes.

Come muse, frigid, loose.

XXI

—You urinate in bed, charwomen

fill your dreams.

You choke their corpses with desire.

Shuffling, side-walking boy,

shirtless in the mirror, gently

lusting to name a stone.

—I did it with my brain.

XXII

You did it with your death,

a mortal cry

your verse, loyalty no insurance,

once you risk a birth.

—For this you pull me from the past?

—Who will miss us

when the mind goes deaf?

XXIII

—In death this all is done. What’s left

no art will feed.

In a ditch, starving, a sullen wolf.

—Fat seasons thinning in time.

Jaws locking calmly on loss.

Too easily our hands touch.

—Let love go? —To seed.

XXIV

Poetry, a murder of order.

I wished for this.

—No one wishes to outlive his verse.

—When rivers lose each other,

seas cease to exist.

If depth and water make a song,

we singing drown past.

XXV

—How not to love a desk awash in notes,

taut line of ink,

reeling furiously. —Every I a mast.

Slippery muse, hook-tipped lips, desperate

dry-heaving foe. The idiot’s temptation

to write once upon the end.

Morality a dangerous continent.

XXVI

—You call this poetry? A beast,

kissing the bunioned stink

of some woman’s towering shoe.

You leap from tree to sky to womb.

—God’s logic is clear: madman’s saliva,

righteous guns that click, sin

baptized in ink.

XXVII

—We bully the body into lines.

A mother’ child,

weeping, fills the space

inside her heart. We brine

the self in human seas. One by one,

He takes us —We are taken.

—Death a final trial.

XXVIII

—Half done prayers call to me:

Fail to save.

I come quarreling through the trees,

a child weeping for a stupid rubber ball.

The sunshine continues its inhuman

pretense. I walk the rail, knowing

nothing and almost brave.

XXIX

—You and I here inside. Let us usher

the sun into the ground.

Write it high: cure the book.

A hymnal, powerful as obscenity.

No questions —Wander the only answer left.

—Endings always a stinking mess.

—This fading past in sound.

Allen C. Jones is a literature professor presently teaching in Norway. His work has appeared in b(OINK), Moss Trill, Slipstream, Bird’s Thumb, Whale Road Review, Pilgrimage, Third Wednesday, The Deus Loci and the Lyrical Landscape, The Bitter Oleander, Fiction Southeast, The Louisiana Review, GSU Review award edition, The Southern Anthology: Louisiana, Ekleksographia, Two Hawks, The American Journal of Nursing, Flaming Arrows, Korea Lit, Maudlin House, and various other journals.

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