Jason Bredle is the author of Pain Fantasy (Red Morning Press 2007); Standing in Line for the Beast, winner of the 2006 New Issues Poetry Prize; A Twelve Step Guide, winner of the 2004 New Michigan Press chapbook contest; and A Pocket-Sized Map of My Heart, a self-published collaboration with Leigh Stein. He lives in Chicago and works at a translation agency in Evanston, Illinois.
Assist Your Boyfriend with His Suffering
Today Amy will make her final announcement
and be put to sleep. In this city, I walk
with one missing several organs. My fortune:
someone you have not seen for a long time
will re-enter your life; you love ponies,
but not to excess. As I'm waving to ducks
at sunset, the sky becomes plum-colored,
the fir trees darken in the wind. The night,
as Ashbery would say, is a Molotov cocktail.
After she's been put to sleep, Amy
has requested that we adorn her corpse with sash
and scepter and catapult her into the sky
to be carried away by passing ducks who
will drop her quietly into the lake. At some point,
you began to hate me, I began to bathe in the dark.
The distance between Toronto and Los Angeles
is 4,081 kilometers. I will forever be
somewhere in the middle, under the plummeting
sky. My milk is black in a white kitchen,
my kitchen red in a white house.