J. Bradley
To the frog-faced men who use the word cuck as a knife
There is such joy when your wife tells you
how this week’s stranger opened her
like a love letter, when she says “yes”
after you ask whether he left anything behind.
You can’t blame her for finding men thicker than you
in all the right places. Your skin flushes
when you compare the scale of their parts to yours.
She always comes home to you.
While she sleeps, you count all the teeth marks,
bruises, and handprints. What they don’t understand
is that some men need to feel small
in order to be men.
J. Bradley is the author of the poetry collection Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books, 2009), the novella Bodies Made of Smoke (HOUSEFIRE, 2012), the graphic poetry collection The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014), illustrated by Adam Scott Mazer, the prose poem chapbook It Is A Wild Swing Of A Knife (Choose the Sword Press, 2015), the flash fiction chapbook No More Stories About The Moon (Lucky Bastard Press, 2016), the novel The Adventures of Jesus Christ, Boy Detective (Pelekinesis, 2016) and the Yelp review prose poem collection Pick How You Will Revise A Memory (Robocup Press, 2016). His flash fiction chapbook, Neil, won Five Quarterly‘s 2015 e-chapbook contest for fiction. His story, “Kyle”, was selected for Wigleaf‘s top 50 (very) short fictions for 2016. He is the curator of the Central Florida reading series There Will Be Words. He received an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University.
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