SELECTED POEMS AND READINGS

SONS OF ABRAHAM
from  My Life as Adam 

My grief grows with the years. I count
seventeen Octobers come and gone,

imagine a green-eyed boy
with hair the color of straw,

wooden walls sturdy on branches
long since chopped and used

for firewood.  The older I get,
the more aches and pains: a nephew

and a treehouse, these things
my brother would have made.

PILGRIMAGE TO ARKADELPHIA
from  My Life as Adam

We lied to our parents
and drove too fast on an overnight trip
to revisit people and places from the limp
and leaning pedestals of his childhood memories.
I helped prop them by listening from
the passenger seat as he told of
what life was like before his parents’ divorce,
before Pangea cracked and drifted apart and
distance as he knew it was created.

A hundred and twenty miles at fifteen is continental,
when crossing county lines seems foreign, when
feeling warmth through the holy shroud of tight denim
is enough to inspire acts of self-inflicted arson.

He knew I was in love with him. I’d hand him
painstakingly-crafted letters on folded notebook pages,
sweet words the same as any cheerleader
would write to the High School Golden Boy.

But he was never golden, this one.
He was a tarnished Boy God of sun-soaked skin,
North Carolina eyes, Arkansas tongue. Southern Colossus chiseled in
Arctic-blue crystal and cloudy onyx,
black hair he or I would push away from his eyes,
black heart that in private pumped lava
just for me. He was
a chest just beginning to define itself,
to define my thoughts and my
slow unfolding.

He was lips wet with spit I craved
and chipped teeth sharp and almost a man.

I remember the moment I acknowledged
I was aroused by thoughts of kissing him,

him, another he,

when before it had been the
bare bone basics,
sex raw and rough, like boys with dirt-stained knees wrestling
with no hint of softness or intimacy.

My hand moving across
the newness of his pectoral muscles, it was the same as
two fifteen-year-olds driving
their first hundred miles in the dark.

When we made it,
he showed me his old house
but couldn’t remember what he’d really come to see.
One in the morning with nowhere else to go
we parked under an overpass and made
peace with geography.

When he looks back,
I’m sure I’m not the jewel in the crown of his youth
but for that year
I was queen in his kingdom.

I still carry the title of royalty.

INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO APPROACH THE BEREAVED
from Less Fortunate Pirates:
Poems from the First Year Without My Father

Do not dance around
the dead elephant in the room.

Do look over your words in the mirror
and remove the last sentence
before it leaves your mouth.

Simplicity is always best.

Do look them in the eyes and say
I’m sorry for your loss

and

Please let me know if you need anything

even if
you secretly hope
they won’t.

INTRODUCING A GRANDSON TO HIS GRANDFATHER
from Less Fortunate Pirates:
Poems from the First Year Without My Father

You will know him through your own
sense of humor, the practical jokes
of heredity that make your eyes water
to the detriment of friends.

You will know him through acts
of kindness, the anchor of heart
that compels you to share your treasure
with less fortunate pirates.

You will know him, little Noah,
when a cat stakes her purring claim
against your leg, when you walk
the first of many dogs on winter nights.

You will know him in your name,
in your knees, in your near
tone-deaf ears that hear melodies
beautiful in the absence of pitch.

Bryan closes the Arkansas Literary Festival’s
Pub or Perish event in April of 2011:

Bryan delivers the Keynote Address at AQLF: