Brendan Sullivan

THREE POEMS

RACHEL 

I will call you Rachel
was all he said.
It suits your mouth, your dress,
the combs in your hair,
like starlight.
It fits the starlings at your feet,
the crows in a perfect vee
at the end of the sky,
the low voice of locusts –
unpronounceable.
And it remembers his handprints,
just how you took them off
and pinned them
to the hem of your skirt
and wore each letter
bareback like his thorns.

COMET

You told me to be a comet –
to grow new wings
and sit out on the roof
and watch the men gather
like seals upon the rocks,
their voices threadbare
warping the wooden pilings
underneath their feet.

You said I was a magnet –
north facing and truant,
missing my arms and legs;
while out in the street
the rain made the dogs go mad
and all the poets were starving
and swallowing their fathers.

You promised you would
take me back with you,
your charity in my pockets
and let me wash myself clean
in your lily pale whys-
my belly slit like a barbarian,
warm and inviting you in –

Both of us remembering
to lock up heaven’s gate
and leave no traces
of our bleeding
or any silent sounds
our mothers could identify
and send to call us home. 

BIKE

Saturday was the last time she could
remember seeing him.
He was riding a bike home from the library –
an ancient blue Schwinn with its back fender
dangling like an acrobat.
He wore a pea coat and his mother’s
old fair isle sweater, the yellow
wool sweating and gasping
as he pedaled down the street.
She noticed his hair needed cutting,
that it tumbled over his collarbone
as he leaned on the handlebars.
His face looked so much like his father’s
at that moment – the black coins of iris
swallowed by too much white and his jaw
chewing the February air that descended
on the buildings –
the quiet rage that good men harvest
mingling with the snow
upon his cheeks.

 

Brendan Sullivan is a lifelong beach bum who has turned from acting to poetry, as he finds it a more remarkable, and at times, reliable muse. He also enjoys surfing, sailing and diving. His work has been published at Wordsmiths, The Missing Slate, Every Writer’s Resource, Gutter Eloquence, A Sharp Piece of Awesome, After Tournier, Bareback Magazine and Bare Hands.