When it slowed I undressed and washed my face.It returned with lightningto tie the game at five.
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.
Reality and Circumstance
There is no reality,
there is only life subject to circumstance.
Reality is how things should be—
it is never how they will be.
I danced once with reality.
I put my hands at her waist
and buried my nose beneath her hair.
Lights flashed,
the jazzband screamed.
She said, It’s circumstance that’s brought us here.
But she wore circumstance like a wreath upon her head.
I wished it a tiara.
I raised high her hand;
spun her away;
closed my eyes;
imagined a night with her,
bejewelling her tiara,
lapping at her jadestones,
shining tight her lapis lazuli.
Too bad, when I opened my eyes,
to find her gone;
the dancefloor emptied;
the jazzband packing up.
Circumstance, the trumpet player,
had taken her home instead.
He bragged to me about it the next day.
I said, Your playing’s flat;
and, She’s more real to me
than ever could she be to you.
Kramer Hair
we’d be goin we’d be goin we’d be goin the stairs, you know? Kramer, you buzzed me strange— that hair of yours? like a scorpion nestled in fedora brim
Black Shoals
You coulda been rich, boy; you coulda owned the mountains.We coulda done business, boy; we coulda hog-tied heaven like rodeo clowns.But you wouldn’t meet my aspen fist, boy; you wouldn’t flirt with the slightest sandbank.You shorted the wrong stock, boy, and got nothin but colors in return.
Desert Drug
Nothing, no effect, which is to say I’m not brilliant.Which is to say that when I pop this jaw my tongue only goes so far.It does not put out fires or fill parking lots. It does not taste basil.The stack of books I burn, the stains of paint I cover with newer, truer stains.And tomorrow do the same, sodden … Continue reading Desert Drug
Snow
by E. Brook Haley The sky and earth collidewhite on whitetowers and steeplesfloating in the air
He Wanted to Bring Back the Big Bang
Describe how this island
became an island; whether
it was once all water or once all rock.
The petrels matter to the ocean.
If they do not fly there is no island—
there is neither coast nor reef.
Under the reef, more rock,
originally hot, now cooled to stone
by the slender hand of God,
reached down from dim Ceres
to leave an invitation
for a séance at Vesta 4.
An invitation we never got.
How could we have?
For, it was buried beneath coral and lamprey,
meant only
for the minor gods of magma and pumice;
for the soft-boned fish,
born in the teeth of the mako,
circling in waters above.
St. Vincent
My thrift-store friend
has no money.
I have a little.
Tonight we’ll slide
down the gray Missouri
throwing foreign coins
at a midnight moon.
Narcissus the Drunk
Occasions for celebration
are plentiful as lost hairs.
He passes a mirror
and catches his glance.
"Not bad," he thinks.
Indeed, he doubles back
for an encore
but ice cube echoes
tell him no.
A glass of cognac waits, melting.
karaoke woman
I can't remember what I miss most,
the poetry in me,
its nickel-hot core,
repeating all the things I say
and wearing that
goddamned purple bra,
repeating all the things I say and
signing the check with a smile.
JBR.com 