Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “what comes first” by Darby Minott Bradford.

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what comes first

By Darby Minott Bradford

I come into the dream on the top edge of the kiss, our first, and the kiss thinking bad things from

someplace else I won’t be putting words to here. So let’s say the kiss thinks the middle of the middle and

more blood on our hands. Let’s say the kiss thinks easement, tax shelter, a limestone raft cannibalizing

itself. Let’s say it thinks a kind of regional violence. Leaky becomes caked dry becomes darker with time.

Let’s say a deadly lick of the brush. A kind of lingering self-luminous. Let’s say on the clothes through

the skin soaked through the bones. Let’s say the ghost of the ghost town, just an artery or two, and my

mouth open, the faintest moan. Let’s say a feeling or feeling it, what comes first? And the kiss still at it

dream kissing I won’t say who, let’s say I start to feel they can feel something is up. I break it off. I open

my eyes and they’re really, really looking at me. Like there’s a dusky moment in motion not quite waning

in their lap—how’d they get above me like that—and their staring me out of my mind, looking for it. And in

the dream, right there somehow on the daybed somehow at the event somehow in the garden’s light, I

want to tell them about the kiss’s thoughts. I open my mouth, but I can’t talk. They open their mouth and

they can’t talk. And somehow we say nothing so loudly, we make out the kiss’s every single thought. The

kiss’s every bad thing from some other places neither of us can spit out. We soften our way around them,

no kiss in the quiet. What once happened to them, what once happened to me. We hold those up in the

sun. The event goes on without us. The next kiss doesn’t think much at all.

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Copyright © Darby Minott Bradford

Previously published in GLYPHÖRIA, Issue III, Metatron Press, Montreal, 2024

Darby Minott Bradford is a hybrid form writer and translator based in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal). They are the author of the Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021), which won the A.M. Klein QWF Prize for Poetry, and was a finalist for, among others, the Griffin Poetry Prize and Governor General Literary Awards. Their most recent book of poetry, Bottom Rail on Top, was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award..

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