by Jari Bradley
BOXING LESSON
for Dwayne Deon Johnson
A FIST CAREENS INTO A FACE
that is not my mother’s
& a crowd cheers.
I bunch my pudgy fingers
up tight—mimicking you
the gloved men & the man
my mother loved
after
my father died.
The dead of your brother
is etched in my face.
I was never the girl you imagined.
I knew it wasn’t every little
girl’s dream—to throw a punch
hard enough to make a man
bleed—but it was mine.
I have known blood
before I ever bled good.
Perhaps this is why
You taught me to aim
between the bridge
of a nose to blacken
both eyes—
insisted that I put all
my weight behind my swing.
The truth hooks
at my mouth
causing the lips to swell—
the dead of your brother
is etched in my face
I believe I am the nephew
you always wanted—
five year old me wanting
to harness a violence
shirtless & swinging
ready to punch through
anything just to make
you proud of me.
THE FLIES
And the flies return
in clusters
I kill and kill and kill
and they return
in their green iridescent luster
and coo out to each other seeking
the warmth of artificial suns.
I wonder about the return
What causes a thing with wings’
desire to be enclosed?
Man parted from God
a wingless thing
and hasn’t stopped praying
for flight
to be a fixture in a nimbus cloud
anywhere above treacherous ground
which demands man remain small
as any other man forced to walk
closer and closer toward his death.
I kill and kill and kill
wishing for my own escape
scrawled across my back
a patterned scarring
of winged tissue
that fixes me in some sky—
the price of such weightlessness
always weighed
In a killing.
JARI BRADLEY is a black genderqueer poet and scholar from San Francisco, California. Jari has received fellowships from Callaloo, Cave Canem, and Tin House. Their work has been featured in the Huffington Post, and is listed by Blavity among "15 Creatives in the Bay Area You Should Know." Their work has been nominated for Best of the Net by The Offing, and was listed as a finalist for Columbia Journal's Fall 2019 Contest in Poetry. Jari's work has also been published or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Academy of American Poets, MARY: A Journal of New Writing, Callaloo, Hot Metal Bridge, Nomadic Ground Press, The Virginia Quarterly Review, BOAAT Journal, Drunk In A Midnight Choir, The Offing, Columbia Journal, and Punctum Books’ Anti-Racism, Inc: Why the Way We Talk About Racial Justice Matters. Jari has an M.A. in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University and is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. They currently serve as Editorial Assistant of Asterix literary journal.