J.Bradley
The Ribcage Recognizes Patterns and Yet Keeps Ignoring Them
Love is a circle, you say
as this week’s want caresses
one neck after the other.
You wait for him to sleep
before you skitter into his bathroom.
You catalog his faults, plan
for the right escape, the one
where you are a corpse
waiting for the right kiss
to reanimate you.
J. Bradley is the author of the poetry collection Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books, 2009), the novella Bodies Made of Smoke (HOUSEFIRE, 2012), the graphic poetry collection The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014), illustrated by Adam Scott Mazer, the prose poem chapbook It Is A Wild Swing Of A Knife (Choose the Sword Press, 2015), the flash fiction chapbooks Neil (Five Quarterly, 2015) and No More Stories About The Moon (Lucky Bastard Press, 2016), the novel The Adventures of Jesus Christ, Boy Detective (Pelekinesis, 2016) and the Yelp review prose poem collection Pick How You Will Revise A Memory (Robocup Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in decomP, Hobart, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals. He was the Interviews Editor of PANK, the Flash Fiction Editor of NAP, and the Web Editor of Monkeybicycle. He received his MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University.
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