SurVision Magazine
An international online magazine
that publishes Surrealist poetry in English.
Issue Ten
JOHN BRADLEY
Confessions of a Secret Vascular Operative
Before I die I should finally confess
to the American people. Everything you have
secretly believed is true. Again and again,
Iceland inevitably bleeds the present
into and out of the future. In a little drawer,
winter – lean, graceful, enormous –
waits for someone to illegally listen.
In the Paris metro, a tissue-thin caterpillar
interprets the random static in our bones.
When I was a keyboard, I would politely
inhale your sickly-sweet smell. Looking
down from clouds, you can see the flight
of a pigeon that cannot see a thick, tarlike
shape bore holes into the earth. You will
find a folding table ate your frontal cortex
without applause. On days like that, 167
scientists flee this world in a cocoon, as you
sink your teeth into a rubbery, strawberry carpet
that says, But look at the living magma.
In Norway someone said, That's not bacon.
That's an umbilical cord. So I didn't,
and I did, and I won't any more. I was right
there when you said: First, the blood. Then
the blood soup. Everything moving moving.
Incognito Heart
Hide your hair. To keep quiet. Keep the quiet quiet.
Speaking over strong tea neither male nor female, I remember
chipping my tooth. Milk pouring on the floor.
I don't ever want you to say, A finger, shot through
with September rains, a fungible finger.
I must have then said, Playing the bassoon, I would
end up in the F.B.I., bassooning before a red door.
Because rage sells glass chimes, bamboo coins,
in an alley in Moscow.
Call it the same blue as the shot-through fog before
it could marry and take revenge. The blue that almost
died before floating visibly into the 19th century.
But for an inextinguishable fire, you nearly said. Inside
the cello wet with night rain.
This ravishing is mine, says the quiet. The almost
too quiet. Incognito heart.
Listening through you. Before it devours.
Mt. Everest, Be Afraid
Tomaz Salamun, should I pack my winter
socks? Will you bring your antipolar TV?
Remind me, how did we say we'll dismantle
Mt. Everest? Brick by brick? Drop by drop?
Why is polymorphia so much easier
over the radio? Especially when crossing
the border into amnesia. Right now the germs
in your gut are talking to the Shakespearian fence
around Amazonia. Don't worry, I pushed the military-
trained mountain deep into 1950s Texas.
My near-twin's finger lightly strokes your
imposter's deckle edge. Have you ever yelled
at a doctor in French? Whiskey can wake a horse
or reduce its memory oil. All night I wondered:
Did I hallucinate stepping into unbaked Hamlet
on skis? One human-to-animal breath can ignite
a moon. Images of sleepers inhaling sleep can be
too erotic. Sometimes oregano will try to unravel
our metallic spinal shell. It's true. Just after
your death, Tomaz, you said, Hey, give me a push.
John Bradley lives in Illinois. His most recent book is Hotel Montparnasse: Letters to Cesar Vallejo, a verse novel (Dos Madres Press). SurVision Books has published his chapbook entitled Spontaneous Mummification, which won James Tate Poetry Prize. He is currently a poetry editor for Cider Press Review.
