Old dogs and a hardwood kayak.
A woman wipes her boning knives on oilstone skin.
The occasional outburst of undress.
The animal of her ankles.
Lean out toward your daughter, shutters open
breeze alone.
A black bag wraps the night in its facts.
The translucent skin on your grandmother’s hands.
Crackling burrs in the old man’s beard,
he whispers cloud physics, flint for his teeth.
We are all we ever had.
Passengers to ourselves.
This is where sex ends and love begins
to fuck you.
Bradley Harrison is currently a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas in Austin. His work can be found in Gulf Coast, CutBank, The Los Angeles Review, Hunger Mountainand elsewhere. His chapbook Diorama of a People, Burning is available from Ricochet Editions (2012).
