Ask Anyone

An overturned behind the garage wheelbarrow bearing sleep fell asleep in an overgrown backyard. And so I find it difficult to say to this day if the body is clay or flame. Maybe that's why I prick my finger each time I touch mistress raspberry or lord nipple. Fewer in the rain can know whether the skinless droplet ignites as it enters the skull. Hair of sleeping trees, hair of the man living in his gravel car, hair of red-headed boy smoked in leafy reefers. Growth in the armpits and groinal cavities making each of us finite rain forest. Ask the Vice President why he's spreading weed killer on his waffle.

Week after week in my defoliated chest I hear Dan Rather a week too soon or a week too late. Even after repeated beatings with umbrella and extension cord, the aroma of rain can be found in motel towel. JFK and RFK, each with pricked forefinger, napping inside the coat closet. Infinite frogs wandering our power lines to and fro. Waffles woven on roofs to protect all below from befalling woe. Even if it could be surgically removed, there's something heinous and famous about the driven anus. Ask the Vice President why the rodent population doesn't deserve a rise in the molecular wage.

Though little with molecular confidence can be stated, much is often stated confidently. Hair of wakeful waffle, hair of the woman watering her wig, hair of red-headed boy available now in time delay capsule form. Infinite frogs bumping to and fro in our blood platelet cities. A row of Marilyn Monroes, each more Marilyn than the last. Call me Rocco, or Bongo, or Boyo. In the outback behind the garage, the stillness keeps fully asleep, with something of me fueling the sleeping, and the sleeper vining round all around.

JOHN BRADLEY is a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council grant and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His book, Love in Idleness: The Poetry of Roberta Zingarello won the Washington Prize. He is editor of Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age (Coffee House Press), an international poetry anthology, and Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader (University of Arizona Press), a collection of essays. He lives in DeKalb with his wife, Jana, and teaches writing at Northern Illinois University.

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