Conor Bracken – Local Author

Conor Bracken is the author of The Enemy of My Enemy is Me (Diode Editions, 2021), as well as the translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, 2019) and Jean D’Amérique’s No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022). He teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Conor will be presenting at Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator Writing Conference at the downtown Cleveland Public Library on September 20-21.

The List

The war. Lead paint. The globe

of a single unhalved grape.
Leaping dog. Ebbing tide. A slide

into any of the crevasses blue and jagged

between the medial and lateral moraines.
Small parade of unspookable

half-starved handfed deer. Tick

a box on the list of things that might
end a child and the list expands

to include now rancid cheese, acid

rain, mislaid rakes. Outbreak,
traffic, mass shooting, sleep.

I do not love the list

but I care for it. I feed the world
into its mouth which it stamps into pellets I then toss

to my reared-up hopping vigilance. It

isn’t love but vigilance gets along with love
the way the tongue-eating louse,

a parasitic isopod that feeds on

the blood and mucus of snappers,
gets along with snappers:

by severing with its foreclaws the muscle

from the mouth and then functionally
replacing the tongue while causing

no other known damage to the host.

I think of this as she and I squat on the sidewalk
chalking shapes the rain will blur

when she dashes giggling toward the road.

The list would never do this.
I lunge, and feel the way the louse must feel,

lashed to the snapper’s whims, battered

by every choice it hasn’t made with its
entire disconnected, inseparable body.

I clutch her to my chest as a Honda shushes by

and her crying eventually lapses. She calms,
climbs down, and puts

the finishing touches on a purple squiggle

she says is me. Of course
it’s not. I might be flat on the sidewalk.

I might be smudged around the edges, uncertain

where I end and where the rough fact
of concrete starts. But come the rain,

its trillion blunted blades, its patient

sawing down of bluntness into smooth,
I’ll still be here, terrified one of us might learn

what it’s like to survive the other.

Copyright © 2024 by Conor Bracken. Used by permission of the author.

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