YELP Review – Pulse

Prayers are easy, as if a god who planned this will siphon the blood from the dance floor back into the bullet wounds they came from if enough of you ask nicely; there are better things you can do with your hands. You know this but yet you continue to barter, shrug your shoulders when you don’t get what you want until a name you know falls out of your mouth and you can’t hear it over the wake of helicopters.

Three Love Letters – J. Bradley

A Love Poem As Written By Ted Cruz

Terrorism is when I wake up
and discover the absence
on your side of the bed.

This suit is a bunker.
This machine gun, 
a chef eager to make 
your favorite breakfast.

Your smile flattens me; 
I wonder what color 
it could make sand glow.

 

The Revolution Is In This Pantoum

Poets lost their shovels
when body counts plateaued.
Skeletons stayed in closets.
Alone, tragedy went home.

When body counts plateaued,
pens stopped swallowing blood.
Alone, tragedy went home,
found a family of shaken babies.

Pens stopped swallowing blood
after the revolution got a job.
A family of shaken babies found
new ways to reach God.
 

				

Three Yelp Reviews

 

 

Q-ZAR, Orange Avenue

 

There was a war every fifteen minutes. The vibration lingering in your chest taught you to aim, to take cover, to wait, to aim, to fire. This was where you counted new bodies, where you wanted to slip your fake name into a mouth like a capsule, be someone’s pronoun.

The replacement building is an erasure, a stake. You close your eyes, snort the last of the dry ice stored in your nose hairs, aim, wait.