BRADLEY TRUMPFHELLER
i synth my finger across my phone screen & watch the crane fly backwards, an echo of yarrow, white as a statue. next was white queer unfucking themself : then rapture : then neon w/ holes. in a clinic i will not tell the nurse my name. my name, in a dead language, means broad field. then paradise. then fell. a decade from now, we would have had words to describe what looking at me feels like. a time machine is a machine for forgiveness. when the world is done w/ us, i wld see u glint in her noise. ... but i wanted to build a natural thing : meadow, chandelier, a twentieth century of leather frontiered in lace. imagine every countryside unwomanly & sirens. the grass sobs : is sobbed across. handcuff, white-gold, cross -dresser: linger here. & who of us would be chorus elsewhere? every mirror an aperture of we. let me show u. when i was a boy, i only spoke one language. when i was a day, i licked its glass from the floor.
from Issue 31.2, Runner-up for the 2019 Wabash Prize for Poetry
BRADLEY TRUMPFHELLER is the author of a chapbook, Reconstructions (Sibling Rivalry Press). Their work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation, jubilat, and elsewhere. A MacDowell Fellow, they are the co-editor of Divedapper and live in Massachusetts.