by John Bradley
Interview with a Creature That’s Been Found Ravaging the Alphabet
Q. Has your tongue ever been burned by a fleeting blackbird?
A. Take a fox apart with a flashlight and a cabbage.
Q. Describe the curative properties of the word indigo when soaked in salt water for 36 hours.
A. Each flake of snow purged the page of the unsewn book.
Q. Someone behind you is kissing a violin.
A. I saw you in a parking lot, selling rain from Machu Pichu.
Q. We heard you once chewing your way out of a cocoon.
A. A shoebox with scraps of sleep can immobilize a sturdy ironing board.
Q. Should we be worried about inadvertent damage done to the brain?
A. Heat coiled inside a hat while others sat with unpunctuated legs.
Q. What do you say when entering a building recently burned?
A. An egg is a place where airplanes may land in an emergency.
Q. Why do you keep looking up at the sky?
A. In the pitcher keep a mouthful of cotton balls.
Q. Should we be worried about brain damage from listening to you?
A. Each morning, Thomas Jefferson swallowed a toad for breakfast.
Q. What can you tell us about the vegetation that grows wild on the letters of the lost alphabet?
A. Many sticks were broken and many sticks were unbroken.
Q. Why do you keep looking up at the sky?
A. Each morning, Thomas Jefferson swallowed a toad for breakfast.
Q. If you wanted to hurt someone all over their body, what verb would you use?
A. Do not change a lightbulb while chanting: A cloud of elephant dust.
Q. When you see blood on the street, what do you do?
A. An armadillo in a pineapple has no fear of the four directions.
Q. How often do you gargle with oil so the words slide easily out?
A. Measure from your right eye to the farthest point in the sky.
Q. How long have you been an agent for Alpha Centauri?
A. Anyone can make a baloney sandwich into an edible compass.
History Always Happening, Even As It Happens
Someone you once knew and who no longer speaks to you
is sleeping on your front stoop. Tiny particles of his body
blow off in the wind and tiny particles of his body constantly
blow back. He seems in no hurry to leave, no hurry to stay.
You must go to work, so you lock the door and step over
his recumbent body which appears even larger now then it was
when you first noticed it. Inspect the root, you hear him say
as you begin to move away. Inspect each ventricle, each atrium
in the root, you hear from the earth on both sides of the front
stoop. Well, someone probably should, you say, as you leave,
but I really don’t have the time right now. At that moment
a large wind sweeps each particle off the front stoop. Your
former friend has departed, leaving behind not even a dried
leaf. Yet you know, when you return home this evening, there
on the front stoop will be another collection of particles,
no doubt someone you once knew.
Short Interpolation of an Atom of History
1.
Examine an atom of history under a microscope and you’ll see
a city made entirely of sugar cubes. Even the residents of this
historic city appear to be made of sugar. Drop a few of them
into your cup of tea and how quickly they dissolve. Drink
the tea, and you’ll soon be saying things like, I’m making history
today by wearing clothes made entirely from a tumbleweed.
And: Abraham Lincoln never left the house without a diagram
of the human knee. And: Please don’t be alarmed by my cranial
history. And: Each night comes the night disguised as night.
2.
All day I transpose specks of light into grains of darkness.
All night I transpose grains of darkness into specks of light.
Each verb carries a history of your every swerve.
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