TWO POEMS
Bradley Harrison
All Things Leaning
Dusted light through an abandoned barn. At the center of a field, solitary dogwood. Train through the city, stopped on a bridge. Steam lifted from the unsteady skin of a river. Into her garden an old, tired woman. Orchids and swelling below. Please take off your shoes, she says. Or said. Bright walls of sound. Will say. Will have said. Please don't laugh in this world. Broken screen door on the back porch. Fiduciary rootedness, cleft of breath and hanging clothes. Any old dog kicking dirt on its shit. Any old dog beneath a choir of stars. Slops of a billowing city. Somebody move me. Before an open window, standing in her bra and panties, washing dishes, white and white. She is America, no I am, no I'm not. Getting beaten in front of a mirror. So long, she says she wanted to say. All drops of dharma. All things collateral. You wait in the leaves. You smell the cold. Silken lap of her bamboo bones, the. Drunk against a pickup pissing. the faint. reeds. Whatever we determine the opposite of fire. A kind of remembering. Toward or away from what we just don't know
The Center of Sickness
they sent for spring and worried about her not writing back the whole house was flowers wooden chair in a white kitchen the borrowed dress rain watching hours on a train watching destruction sometimes structure and texture perpetual weather pouring water she had the frailest fall from her window naked and white tears furious with hunger she put on the old dress and slow danced shoulders shaking starched and fragrant hidden completely in a bouquet of silence a series of symptoms habits and patterns piano sonatas heels against the door ears like sugar imagine any white world in the whole wide world only know that if you punch her soft lips she will spit ashes