Contributor Spotlight: Bradley Harrison

Thoughts on “Sky are Dead” from Hayden’s Ferry Review 52

Perhaps language bursts. Comes in. Bursts. Perhaps the image is partial. Order disorder. Language attempts both, simultaneously. Perhaps. Poetry does, certainly. Sometimes. Poetry sometimes can fracture and mend simultaneously. Just as memory fractures and mends. After all. The opposite of dismember is remember. Like Ezekiel in the Valley. Chapter 37. Prophesy to these bones. As I was prophesying, there was a noise. Bone to bone. Tendons and flesh. And breath entered them. I am going to open your graves. I will open your graves and bring you up. And I have done it. I have.

And sometimes the features are all out of scale. Cubism. Or something deconstructed. The major movements of 20th century art are either centrally. Or peripherally. Concerned with the broken. Dada. Surrealism. Modernism, yes. The PoMo hobos. Et. Cetera. Et Al. Blah blah.

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Chance. Physics. Shipping crate accident. Kinetics. Neural firings. He said it’s better. It’s better with the cracks. And he was right, that son of a bitch.

Look. Everything is ending. You see that, right? And it’s okay. See it now? There is something courageous, if vain, about grammar. An insistence on order. We are fools, though. Of course. The Second Law says so. Chaos is destiny. Yikes. And yet. We sit. With our feet in still waters. With our fingers interlocked. And isn’t it right to be like this a while? And isn’t it the body, for now, to feel whole?

Rimbaud shows up, as he will, in the foliage of caves. And your parents making love. And then you. And then parting. And the flicker. That’s it.

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Bradley Harrison is a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas in Austin. His work can be found in New American Writing, The Los Angeles Review, Forklift Ohio, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northeast, Hunger Mountain, New Orleans Review, Best New Poets 2012 and elsewhere. His chapbook Diorama of a People, Burning is available from Ricochet Editions (2012).