Leia Bradley
Lucille, Watch Out For The Dadaists!
Lucille,
when you gifted me a book on surrealism,
you told me to keep it under my pillow
to dream better stories. Stranger ones, stories
with gelatinous, sloping hills and huntresses. You
are always telling me I shouldn’t shy away from discomfort,
but you make me take off my stilettos
as soon as I come over—not for the sake of city dirt,
but because you worry about the pain in my soles. I tell you
the denial of pain is a constant state,
so why not strut through it? You pretend to smack me
with a pink, transparent Pleaser. It matches your nails perfectly.
Tonight we’re playing with each other’s fingers on the floor,
swanning around in the hardwood lake
in lithe violet light. You’ve recently decided to be a psychoanalyst,
and are even more gorgeously insufferable. Everything
does mean something else, you know, she says. I know,
I know! Your bookshelf lilts Lacan
and Freud and Mallarmé, and I pick up your book on Duchamp, feign shock—Oh, well,
what’s this! And hold a match
just shy of its pages. Someone
tell the writers, quick,
the dadaists are coming,
quick! They’ll take the meaning out of everything, they’ll pirate
your stanzas and plunge them into deep vats
of cerulean paint cans, they’ll make the lineated order of verity
wiggle and writhe until
they’re only squirming in one, infinite nothing of blue. You laugh
and throw Mina at me,
say, ideas are healthier
when they compete, as if all strength comes from disagreement. Lucille,
I’d like to skinny dip in the cracks between time
with your smile
and all the heavy rest of you.
In the moonlight,
preferably.
It seems separate from yourself: the upcurve
of your Rosetti lips. Your smile
seems other, somehow, farflung
and inaccessible to your striated, mimetic muscle curl,
still
I see your wisdom hungering
for better questions
in the indigo light.
Your back arched over the couch, straining
for the perfect angle. A sea of polaroids, squaring moments
like a bed of geometry’s memory
could ever grasp the edges of you. Your skin is oceanic, swallowing,
you: a violet gnaw of need.
What can I give you
to tell you I’m
a shadowbox of a struggling thing, too,
that you can feel safe here, see, feel
my arms around you, disappearing lines
into magenta, a pleasurable disemboweling, let’s
put our skin costumes on their hangers for awhile,
close the closet doors, let’s step into each other’s
omnipresent horrors, here, I’ll go first:
I think there’s something wrong with me
because I wouldn’t mind to die alone,
slowly,
away from
all threatening green. Money
for momentary gluttony, life incessantly knocking
on our doors, our lingerie drawers, Lucille I
know about key cards and bare back and thick envelopes and
the irrevocable daunt of emptiness
that follows, but listen I
could have a whole conversation with the echo
made by the basin of your collarbone. Listen,
we’ll outrun the meaningless, even in heels.
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Image by Zohaib Mayo from Pexels
Leia K. Bradley (they/she) is a backwoods Georgia born, Brooklyn based lesbian writer and performance artist and an MFA Writing candidate at Columbia University, where she also was awarded the Undergraduate Writing Teaching Fellowship for 2023-24. She has work in Poetry Project, Aurore, Wrongdoing, Ghost City, Tarot Literary, Versification, JMWW, Wild Greens, Peach Fuzz, and more, with her poem "Settle(d)" chosen as the Editor's Choice Best Overall pick for Penumbra Magazine's 2022 Pride issue. After climbing out from the coffin of her first divorce, she is accepting love and lust letters through her twitter @LeiaKBradley or instagram @MadameMort.
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