Author: johnbrandall

John Randall is a writer living in Missouri. His interests include camping, running, walking, cutting and burning wood, messing around with magnets, foraging, and listening to podcasts, many of them about baseball.

Jump

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Someone had to help her
start her car.
Someone showed up
with jumper cables
but no car.
And no insurance.
Cell phones
didn’t work out there.
Out where?
Oh, out where
the tracks still run,
where I’ll bet cowboys
in dusty leather
ride mean-hungry horses
waitin' for the next call,
the next big thing.

They aren’t internet cowboys.
They don’t believe in
price tags, or
interest rates.
Not even belt buckles
or smiled ruined
by chew.
At the end of the day,
it’s all about stew
and cornbread:
a sauce for everything
poured on wounds
makes them whole.

Let’s see, is it
red on black
or black on black,
and why won’t this thing go?

Lump of Wood

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I
Lump of wood.
I split it,
I’m takin it.

II
Got it off a
red-cheeked maple
in Santa Claus, IN.

III
Lived to be cut down
thanks to the
Paperwork Reduction Act
of 1995.

VI
I was of three minds,
like a lump of wood
in which there are three logs.

V
In a storm
there is only gas
(breath of earth)
and wood
(mother’s heart).

VI
When a leaf burns
it becomes a star.
When it changes color,
a crimson decision.
Fall the time of its choosing.

VII
How many lumps of wood?
How many fires?

VIII
The smoke only
stings my eyes
when I leave
the fire's side.

IX
The coals a meditation
crumbling to heat
the future.

X
Its denouement ashes,
when spread over beds,
a singular taste
in next year’s tomatoes.

XI
In the end there is only
whiskey and wood,
a balm against
splenetic mood.
And windows frosting over
in the mind,
and memories of bark
shedding like a rind.

Pub

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We are not unlike          the Irishmen.We also wear          long, woolly scarves.We also have          girlfriends               who mock our scarves     and protest in colors          when we say               they are drunk.

Enough With the Miracles

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I don’t seek themthey just fall outlike when that girlran through hereand her right breastpopped out of her shirtlike manna from heavenfor this grade-school boywho stayed up all nightbelieving in Christuntil the left oneappeared above his bedlike a rosy pupilogling him in the darknessmaking him swear notto waste his time prayingfor miracles anymore.

Iben Browning’s Blues

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The sound an airplane makes
is what it means to cut the sky with a knife.
Contrails are not clouds but sutures—
scars left behind, eventually fading,
no soil in blue.

Sadly, I have no more visions.
I foresaw neither Connecticut
falling into the ocean nor
the tremulous sinkhole it bred
in my second-floor apartment.

Pelted again with
the stones of incorrectness,
I’ve had to evacuate the state.

Keep the borscht cool.

See you in November.

To narrow wins,
to fat ones,
to pretenders.
To the factory shut down
then sent away.  We
welcome you back
under different rules.

Everyone got drunk
when Congress worked together.
This time it’s different,
turn the page.

Beach Hymn

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It’s right, it’s bright.
It’s brighter than
the light of the Lord out here…

At the shore there is no one
between me and the Lord, save
a thousand sleeping fish and
men hunting for hidden oil.
I walk along the coast, right
at the edge where tide rubs away
the land like an eraser, only
to pencil it back in twelve hours
later.  I leave footprints in the
sand, shallow sculptures wrought
of endless shards of glass, whose
sides have been polished smooth
by the alabaster pull of the moon,
sucked clean of color by the glaring
sun.  These footprints are my only
testament, proof that I’ve sought
communion with something bigger.
They alone would save me—
if not for the caustic waves, tricky as
atheist preachers, which keep on
washing my offering away.

When the wave feints into the shore
its body vanishes.  But the
water remains, unchanged.

—Navarre, FL