Originally from small town Texas, Brady Riddle currently resides in Shanghai, China, where he teaches secondary English at Shanghai American School. Brady has been recognised and awarded in various journals around the world since 2002; featured poet and presenter at writers’ conferences and poetry festivals from Houston Texas to Muscat, Oman to Shanghai, China. Most recently, Brady’s work can be found in Spittoon Collective in Beijing; A Shanghai Poetry Zine in Shanghai, China; and Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine in Hong Kong.
The Gravity of Water
“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing …”
—J. Alfred Prufrock
I’ve carried your weight like breath
at a bottom of a sea
currents swimming in what used to be
called arterial
chewing grains of sand settled here, slipped
just behind my lips by eddying minute hands
I clear my throat and not have
a cough slip
from remnants of a castle
we didn’t build
far away enough from reactionary tides:
wood would have drifted longer
and made these crumbling walls stronger
but probably would have flotsammed
onto another distant beach
…
You complain I drink too much
these days—but this deep in, it only comes
in waves
like every other dish you’ve served
(oh! how I wish
I could breathe air not filtered
through all of this)—
These silhouettes dancing
on the skin of night
outside the surface
tension of the moon
I look up moon-eyed, flat
on the floor, can’t tell breath
from bubbles from this stare
anymore—
face up where desperation
lies and memories blur
and begin to die
I can’t decipher
an inhale from
a …
… sigh
~
Last Night We Lived as Poets
stoking fires we carry sparks for—
an accumulation of lines in the pores of our bones
the reflex for a solid turn in the sinew
of memory—
we hunger to own a piece of blank space—
furtive glances from something we know
to faces we don’t—the lust to reveal one thought necessary and true
(the molecular composition of desire—desire’s marrow
under our skin—like mechanics of tension and resilience) when to turn
a line, drop a word or end it altogether
(rhetorical shift)
time does not stand for poetry—we read
and sweat for it over cold pizza in the front window of some joint
at midnight
and before that in coffeehouses breaking down metaphor
on sidewalks and building them back out crisped on stages
we fabricate for the moment then return as quiet space—
if it is even legal to say all this here which it is if you are a poet—and
we say everything because we are
respirating and digesting sublimation—living, necessarily living
each drop of a word spilled meticulously onto pages we cannot call
pages any more
after midnight when the ink is running dry and screen-glow
sheds light just outside a dark alley where the whispers still echo—
will continue to echo—
on a lonely street when everyone has packed it all in for the night
but us—fragmenting but the words
fly between us like the syllabic kisses still burning on our lips
from the staircase, from the living room, from the walk there
Here comes the envoi—
this is no rhyming couplet: Poets don’t exit the night—
and they don’t go quietly—like a poem, they close it.