Today’s Poem
Detection
In this story, a boy in love
with detective fiction confronts
stovetop clues to his grandmother’s
new-found forgetfulness. He can’t
believe the woman who taught him
to read to be caught in time’s undertow.
Sherlocking through the basement
together, flashlight in hand,
no one knows which way to the fuse box.
Stormy nights like these he stops
reading and wonders, maybe the very same
thing as his grandmother does:
Where did my father go?
Who made this mess for me to clean up?
Why doesn’t Dr. Watson kick down the door?
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
After Seeing Rossetti’s The Day-dream
The garden must have sprung
up around her dress
just this afternoon. She couldn’t
have climbed that far all swoony-
eyed with an open book and flower
in her good hand. She would’ve
snagged each barb on silk,
slingshotting one sandal at a time
down as her father cussed.
No, the garden’s still growing.
She grasps the branches like a horseless
set of reins. Rossetti’s distracted.
He tells her: I’ll give you ten thousand
shades of green to know his name.
The one that’s trapped below
your breath, below the beating.
The one owning the hum and click
of each of your lungs.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Self Portrait as Still Life
The box fan in the window
whirls, but doesn’t disturb
the wren shuffling the deck
of leaves outside. Five book-
shelves cradling dust
mites and countless homes
for spiders. The roll top desk
grandfather left. What would
he have written on this yellow
legal pad—list of Louis L’Amour
books he remembered reading,
notes of where he might have left
some keepsake: keys to a small
boat, a kind set of hands to touch
a woman with. Now a photo
of a girl too beautiful to keep.
A hoarding of rubber chickens,
broken watches, notes on the word
fuselage, and tomorrows locked
in a collection of mason jars.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Seeing what Van Gogh Saw
At an August sunset
twenty students miss seeing
it. Also, the groundhog and fox-
scent. Even the raccoons
rattling the leaves. The professor
notes reactions in a moleskin.
Stones thrown and insults arc
with authenticity. Almost
lost in the trees, the last bit of sun.
A boy leans into a girl’s ear:
This is what Van Gogh painted
before he committed suicide.
The van’s engine and fog lights
call them back. She’s grape-vining
her legs around him. Someone
else picked up his backpack.
He carries her and his sweat
works on her like Novocain.
Seeing a sunset is seeing the residue
of the terrain and trains
you took to get here.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Distribution
The newspaper boy. His skeem
that got this going. Our papers
disappeared every morning,
not long after they landed in the bush,
teetering on the lawn chair, or top
of my sedan. This is seven a.m.
Weeks later our mail started to turn
up missing. The box in the door—
gone. Then the starts to the next
house in the street. Still, on the last
day of the month he presents his bill.
He rings the bell. The milkman.
His skeem to smother the boy
in his own news ink.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Boy Explorer
He discovered the ancient
city the headmaster always
talked about. The fur
coats of the upright-
walking animals were covered
in a fine layer of blood.
Hiding by the wishing well,
sending an S.O.S. to the boys
camping nearby, they caught
his neck in their teeth.
The boy, alone in the make-
believe land of real savages,
tries to friend the birds,
tries to get a message out
a window no bigger than a fist.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Bread Crumbs
Anglers cannot be trusted,
the ones wading in the streams,
at least. Leaning into the current
makes a man think he can stand
squarely and render judgment
upon the deer, the kingfishers,
not remembering those he left
at home. All the trains are out
of sight now. The fish aren’t biting.
The man hikes into higher ground,
running from his reflection
in the swamp. Alone he cries,
battered and looking for crumbs.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
The most beautiful girl
in town—is not. She moved
to Tanzania. Waking in a house
at the foot of Mt. Kilamanjaro
after hearing all the scratch and squawk
prehistoric birds nesting
on her roof could muster.
It’s hard to imagine this scene
without her singing and floating
off into the clouds, wireless.
“It’s not like it was in Niger,”
she writes to me, not mentioning
knives that carved the hard-won
stipend from her purse.
Strange to see her as the house-
mother for twelve college girls.
It’s Ramadan now and they all take
turns fasting with the one girl
who’s Muslim. But I pray
she doesn’t starve too long.
Back home a town still teeters
at the swing of her hips.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Revival
Willing and bound, it was love
like a man folding his knees
up in a sinking keg. Or at least
that how it feels now that I’m rising,
massaging the indentations,
pushing blood back into the skin.
I’m breathing in the brightness
and the earth beneath my feet—
well, at least I’m trying.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Dance Dance Dance
Reading Murakami and half-assing
vodka gimlets in an old canteen,
I think everything will be alright,
if I can remember enough Japanese
to say: Excuse me sir, but where
did you get that goat suit?
Moving parts inside the moving
parts, from here I go to Hawaii and back
home shoveling snow. Mysteries
don’t hide in a Maserati, money does.
My friend the actor can’t stop
his ex-wife from eating his spleen
after screwing. I understand this too
and shuffle on. If you look at bad news
long enough, you’ll find the news ink
smudged and running with your name.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Wars of One’s Own
Stealing manhole covers when the cruiser
pulled up, calling my name, like a nurse’s
aid. They clubbed me good and I thought
I saw a doctor. The cell wasn’t the kind
that makes photosynthesis but there were
some real fruits in there. I slept like a stone
growing another stone out of its head.
Joan of Arc wouldn’t put up with this shit.
But they had her on their microfilm,
too, that’s why she shaved her head and took
off to old Mexico. Boy, the banditos
will never see that coming. I tried
her a few times, enough to tire of the taste
of blood in my mouth. After that she taught
me to sell scraps and scavenge in the recesses
of the city’s guts. She said: Look where they don’t
and take what you need.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Thank You Note Cribbed from William Carlos Williams
-For Chad
This is just to say
buenos dias for helping
me get the ticket to Belize
City and telling me to stay
at Los Amigos Youth Hostel
in the island city of Flores,
Guatemala. This was the fountain
of youth Ponce de Leon
was looking for, not Florida.
Irrigator of dreams, this open air
café growing poems, along side
lizards, Aussies, eye-openings,
the Dutch kid DJ hanging
on top of chicken busses,
and the howler monkeys. The beer
was cold enough and the friends
were easy. One day, I’ll pay
you back with a red wheelbarrow
full of avocadoes, Quetzals, and songs.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
At Woods Edge Hiding Out
For five nights now our hero
has been sleepless on account
of the poison ivy and the steroids
used to get it gone. He hunts
spiders that hide behind
portraits of his mother and the long-
lost dog. A doctor once told him
that fangs are full of bacteria.
The poison’s not the point.
Under the skin motes of half-eaten
insect carcasses collect, calling up
bad blood and fester. The white
walls of our hero’s house are stippled
and smeared where books, boots
made a death mask with eight legs.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Bird Dead on the Mississippi Shore in St. Louis
I set out for the meeting with champagne
meant to celebrate something that happened
when I hadn’t been looking. Celebrate not sinking.
Dust off the bottle. These things I say aloud.
Meeting friends, I pass the bottle to the girl
with ice, salad, and a bag to put all this.
People living and working in tugboats
pass, still living like Huck Finn except
for their very fancy phones. We gather
at rivers edge to sit on stones and drifted
tree trunks. We pretend to fish and the fish
don’t notice. A log shifts under the girl’s foot,
revealing a dead bird. The flies scatter and we
scram into the house on the hill.
We feed the mosquitos without noticing,
we’ve been uncorked.
-Jason Braun
Yesterday’s Poem
Characters Castaway
Moonpie is the god-talker and king of the cantina,
he trades us shrink-wrapped, air-tight
sweeties for the plantains, boars fat hung
around rib and hind, and a million little fish.
Mamasan is the nurse made of nightingale,
toothache, and codeine.
Me, I’m the man in the middle of them—
the cold current, featherless buzzards
scrounging and the thieves.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Skipping School and Some Things
I didn’t believe in dumbing down,
not for the teachers, who one day,
reaching to the bottom of a mason
jar, had no answers for my questions.
Remembering Plato or Socrates
was easy. I also drank the poisons
of my day and called them Hot Damn.
Girls from other schools liked
the way I leaned. My best friend
ran internet service provider
during our senior year, when
we weren’t sitting at the coffee shop.
I skipped school, drove over
the river into St. Louis’s Washington
University. A little man lectured
on Darwinism, this you couldn’t get
in Waterloo, Illinois. Keep crawling
you’re not out of the cave yet.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Misremembering
It is a foolish thing to forget
your hometown, wrapping
it around a banjo riff,
and joking with city folk
the toothless and cow-tippers.
When the water rises again
from the sinkhole to take
back all your kin, it will
find you on that downtown
rooftop praying to the god
of your parents.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Triptych Mirror
Like hairpins made of bone, everything beautiful
about you calls for it’s lost flesh
and nothing I can say into your mouth
makes a goddamn difference.
Once, all this mapped skin wasn’t a curse.
It was a girl who looked to long in the mirror.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
The Long Terms
I had just closed the door
at your last word. Stepped
like lighting in two ten and half
shoes on the hardwood.
This is what long term
relationships look like, she said.
Her in the corner of a bar leaning
into some guy from work, me stewing
in the wash back and slowly growing
cro-magnom in my grin.
Therapy ain’t cheap. I’ve spent
too long studying stagecraft and nonverbals,
writing’s not on the wall—it’s who touches
who first and how long until they break
doors, red lights, clips, zippers, and nylon.
-Jason Braun
Fidelity Stron…
Fidelity
Stronger than the theater’s bass, more
fuzzed out than the old TV tube could muster,
this is how I hear you. Talking under
water or in hailstorm of stones and crows.
They said redundancy is good for radio,
so many signals get lost, and people
aren’t always listening close to the sounds
our words are making. Oh, Marconi,
I know you’re still out there keeping
an eye on me and her. You’re caught
in the rafters or in the half glued egg-
crate studio of some kid looping high-hats
louder that his parents plate-break and door-
slam. What songs and sons would we’ve
birthed into the charts and the stars.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
A Box To Be Born In
Because I was the second
child. Because I was born
months before my father’s
death. Because its impossible
to count the kindness, favors
my widowed mother granted
me. Because the tender needed
to reprimand a wrist went
against my sister. Because
a dead man’s son is a white,
walking, and sinless shadow.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
On Visiting the Home of Mark Twain in Hannibal, Missouri
Over two hours in a borrowed car
before we park and navigate
through the small river town stone
streets. This is not Whitman’s
song of myself, learned astronomer,
or pontification on a Brooklyn bridge,
this is the story of the poor. The gap-
tooth owners and the shoeless folks
in cut-off jeans. They live
in close proximity to their animals.
This was the land of straw hats,
moonshine, and slave owning.
Twain didn’t have it easy, transcendental
high roads were washed out.
That’s why he sent Huckleberry
down the river of machinations,
with a white boys memory
of what it’d be like to runaway
on a raft with a man like Jim.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Small Talking With a Ghost
After the bi-plane buzz wore off,
she still floated for weeks, into arms
of children. She taught them ABC’s
and taught me to read the iambic line
aloud. After eating barbeque in Brooklyn,
walking arm in arm, mouth to mouth
pass brownstones and the decade’s
momentary decay, she turned the prop
once or twice before it caught, taking
her and our old-fashioned fantasy away.
-Jason Braun
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