Brick by Brick
I was flattered to find a pyramid of all the dick pictures I’ve ever sent in my yard. Someone cared enough to collect them all, print them, and build it without waking me up.
I don’t cringe as I get closer to the pyramid, to the best part of me in various angles, sometimes with objects to provide scale (Stella Artois can, remote control, an unsharpened pencil, a fountain pen, a Bic lighter). My hand goes through the pyramid when I reach out to touch it. The pyramid disappears as I step through it, leaving behind a coffin planted upright in the grass. Everything in me says “don’t open it” but I never listen.
The photo album I found in the coffin shows me in various poses in front of the bathroom mirror, naked. I reach the point in the photo album where I am sucking in my gut so it doesn’t eclipse the scenery, where I use light and shadow to soften my age. I close the album before I can go any further, put it back in the coffin. I think about how much lighter fluid it will take, what the smoke will bring.
J. Bradley is a writer based out of Orlando, FL. He is the author of the graphic poetry collection, The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014), with art by Adam Scott Mazer, and the forthcoming Yelp review prose poem collection Pick How You Will Revise A Memory (Robocup Press, 2016). His chapbook, Neil, won Five [Quarterly]’s 2015 e-Chapbook Contest for Fiction. He runs the Central Florida-based reading series/chapbook publisher There Will Be Words and lives at iheartfailure.net.
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