Three Poems

1 [I peel the orange in one motion]

I let the TV lull me to sleep. I walk all throughout the house. I draw a map poorly in the dirt. I turn and turn a stone in my pocket.

I forget to include a key to the map. In one grid of the map, burdocks gathering around the dead tree. Smudges gathering around the burdocks like dogs.

The map has every kind of weather. And rain when my finger falls through.

2 [ the blue age]

My name is John and I can do all the things John can.

John and I are receptive to codependency. We tend

To each other’s hunting dogs and have the same inseam.

John and I have the same palm-sized grief

That we can’t show each other.

He builds my refuge and I build his.

It’s mean to be sad at John.

Here are John’s four hands.

Here’s John four-in-hand.

Here’s John looking real good.

There’s nothing that I can’t teach John that he can’t teach me.

3 [false spring]

Dear wish, a small fire in a jar
proves me unchanged.

The lead high in my gum remains
un-worked-out and has no reason to leave.

There are nights I go
without my bad nerve acting up.

When I sketch the fire’s outline
it is blurry with physics.

There are nights I go
to sleep in error

and push up out of my dreams.
Bone-cold and not so sudden.

∩

TR Brady is a writer from Arkansas. They received their MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. TR’s work has appeared in Tin House, Bennington Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. They are the co-founder/co-editor of Afternoon Visitor and live in Moscow, Idaho.