Bradly Brandt is an Arizona resident and recently graduated with a B.A. in English at Arizona State University. Bradly has served as Poetry Editor for Superstition Review and has attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. ---------
Morning
On the beach everything went haywire;
The stepping on the carcass of a Black Stork,
A dog struck on the side of his head by the owner,
And the salmon now run the delta; a man on a weir
Counts them. I see another person hold a fledging,
His creviced fingers just too tight around the neck
Of the flailing thing─ No secrets are here, he says,
No Holy Grail, no need to fly─
To notice how, in the all-the-usual natural world,
The leaves curl prior to a storm, then uncurl,
As if for a moment, unwilling to endure
What might change a life forever.
This roughness versus that, or the desire
to be bridled, then unbridled, thinking,
too much dust, not enough leaves.
Under The Elms─
I thought you were something else… a lord,
maybe, that came to watch dew slag off the roses
in a type of wind that precedes a storm. You.
The hunter, giving a-sound-so-human, as if
the mending of a bow… and my body,
like the carcass of a fallow deer with its
new antlers, drips blood on the tips of grass;
This is what love is. You, fucking me. Not asking,
but taking. A sort of sorrow that follows desire.
To be jealous of light in its morning break,
the way it always rises and forgets the night before.