Alexia & 2 Yelp Reviews

J. Bradley

Alexia

I was a shedding nest, my breath  
a wriggling worm above open beak.
 
Hold me like a book.  
Read how you will survive me.  
 
Read how love can create an artifact  
even chemistry cannot save.

Yelp Review - The Stranger

Name each nerve in your hand.  
Write the names on slips of paper,  
scramble them in a hat,  
and then choose one.  
Leave the hat in a safe place after.  
 
How will you say the name today?  
Will the vowels twang like a bow string  
before or after release? When will you swallow
the name like a pill, choose the next one?  
 
Be wary of the bordello of you, the corruption  
of muscle memory. Her name is her name  
unless your back is Newton, the bed an apple tree.

Yelp Review - The Fun Machine

We could rent the skin of anyone we wanted until coin or lives or levels ran out. We unlocked triple combos better than we could lock eyes or hands, better than we could unlock mouths or bra. We were tired of baseball as a metaphor of the loneliness in our bodies; every John Hughes film was wrong. 

J. Bradley is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominated writer whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals including decomP, Hobart, and Prairie Schooner. He was the Interviews Editor of PANK, the Flash Fiction Editor of NAP, and the Web Editor of Monkeybicycle. He is the author of the poetry collection Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books, 2009), the novella Bodies Made of Smoke (HOUSEFIRE, 2012), and the graphic poetry collection The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014), illustrated by Adam Scott Mazer. He is the curator of the Central Florida reading series There Will Be Words and lives at iheartfailure.net.