Two
poems from Bradford Gray Telford's Perfect Hurt
followed
by a note on the author
Melia
azederach
When
we cut back
your mother's chinaberry tree
she didn't quite cooperate,
didn't go peacefully.
Storms
were coming in.
A storm was rolling out.
I Googled her.
I like to
know about
a
thing before I do
it harm. Pride-of-India,
Texas Umbrella, Persian
Lilac,
Bead Tree and Japonica –
a
name for every home.
A crime for every alias.
I clicked her yellow fruit
–
rock-hard, poisonous –
cut
her leaflets – toothed, blue-green
and toxic – dragged along
her bark –
a curative though deadly,
pasted the buff, hallmark
fissures
wrenched tight
across her purpled torso
elongating her pain,
a late
El Greco
(though
each spring she'd burst
in drooping lilac panicles).
Your mother
wasn't well.
Sport utility vehicles,
two
of them next door
plus a brand new fence,
the storm, her terrible cough,
impeccable evidence
that
the dead limb-
one of three in the trunk's braid –
would cleave off
easy
(wrong – again). I was afraid.
Lyric
and decorative
foreign-born Melia,
a transplanted Ruth,
invasive,
diligent Medea
wild
as the bow saw bit
into her soft back.
We got her down,
her snapping
twigs black
with
your blood and my blood,
the sheeted sweat, the flecks of skin,
a ritual
we'd do once
and be done with and then
you
watched me jump.
I crushed her spine.
We left her by the road.
What's
yours is mine
and
what is mine may well
be yours. I think. We're both givers.
It was getting
late.
We looked down: ants, carpenters
sifting
their wreckage,
dirt, dried pith, broken phloem,
pale larvae clamped tight
in black jaws.
There – there was the poem.
The
Conversation
We were
drinking Diet Coke and talking about our dream house.
Inside: Birdseye maple,
concrete floors, pin-spots, his-and-his and his-and-his.
Outside: rot, weeds,
jays on a soon-to-be-downed wire:
design within nature within desire and desire.
I
drew a box and you drew a box and we had two boxes.
My father always said
build more house than you think you can afford.
You like color and comfort
and nothing too weird.
I like hundreds of rooms – big, empty as Texas.
We
kept at it with crayons and rulers and colored papers.
I showed you mine:
stick figures, smiley faces, lots of big orange hair.
You said you were frightened
of the pet purple monitor lizards.
You kissed me and we made love for an hour.
Then
you drew a bedroom with ivory walls, bark trim, one spectacular window.
Ten
steel clocks that showed the season and the minute.
Maybe I would quit smoking.
Maybe you would win the Lotto.
We closed our eyes and made our bed and slept
in it.
©
Bradford
Gray Telford was educated at Princeton and Columbia and has published work in
many journals including the Yale Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review,
Pleiades, Laurel Review, and Bloom. A doctoral candidate
in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, Telford recently
won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize for his work on the poetry of Geneviève
Huttin.
"Melia
azederach " first appeared in Phantasmagoria, and "The Conversation"
first appeared in Hawai'i Review.e,
