Poetry by Bradley David

​Carly Jane Casper CC




Some People Watch The Drinking Bird Go Dry

I haven’t seen her for a year,
my mother, calling me from the harbor.
Watching a floatplane spade
billowing furrows of water.

It’s headed straight for you!
A Tiger-shark grin
with a propeller bent on revenge!
I might have said,
but she’s eavesdropping on a couple
seated at the edge of the end. 

So entrenched in divorce 
they can’t even see the lake,
she might have said,
but I’m mourning an old trout and
blending the color of an old bench.

Farm-budget-green seat, smoothed
by the denim of love and loss.
I can't tell where the ears of its paint chips begin
or the mouths of its stories end.

She has so much ocean
she can’t even see its edges.
I’d ask her to describe the far shore,
but ends are the kinds of things
I catch her trying to ignore.

I wish she’d send me a starter kit:
Glass cylinder of glittering water,
hygroscopic salt for this droughted city seeding.
A drop of hope to inoculate a bucket
in this faceless penny desert fountain.

This skittish desire of bone-dry coyotes.
Oasis for cactus bees so thirsty
their striped spiracles look like
empty bladders of closet-floor purses.

I’m listening to myself wanting water
when, all of a sudden, she tells me the time
between her and her mother
is closing.


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Bradley David's poetry, fiction, essays, and hybrid works appear in Terrain, Plainsongs, Exacting Clam, Stone of Madness, Fruit Journal, and others. New work is forthcoming in Allium, Always Crashing, Unstamatic, and the museum of americana. His work can be found at linktr.ee/bradleydavid. On Twitter @strangecamera and on Instagram @mystrangecamera. When not attending to his coop of rescue birds, he is putting the finishing touches on his first banned book.