Lullaby for Thirsty Lawn Furniture 

the chairs hunker down
under layers of misuse
and dust. the air shimmies.

the cracking cushions know
those vast consumptive stars
better than any single eye
combined with any other.

inside, the acid porcupine quills
drip, sting velvet nerve endings,
those tiny pink pins quivering
at the edge of agreeable dissonance.

Outside the unkempt layers melt,
skin sliding off the bone
white moon, the black sky
two charcoaled lungs of night.

the music goes straight
through, a marrow song
beating a silk drum muffled
in a string tendon quartet.

something of the moon is borrowed
an extrapolation of stars
the missing note a key
transposed on skin.

the rain on the roof
is a tin drum, a brass band,
a whole bone symphony.

Ode to Four Letters

there is no iconography too primitive
to house your exalted harp-strung syllables–oh,
when the moment disillusions sad eyes, I see you,
spectral over an enigmatic strip of bacon
at a table set for one. there in sweet need you settle
like an obvious epiphany pressing your name on my lips.
I need no sheets to conjure the other side, as I
am often guided to you by an unseen wall. 
Even with no hand on my skin, the soft hairs porcupine,
and I am a child mindfully kneeling before
the unspeakable unknown.

it’s how you straddle my pillow like a preposition,
rattle the window panes, causing the space between
to bioluminescence. the saints snore until you enter,
those narcoleptic whores who require hair-shirts
to awaken from their ritualized transcription
of all our repentant mumblings. 

alters can be found anywhere or counted like beads on fingers. 
floating after sad nouns left behind, inhabiting no corporeal space,
you are perpetual motion, a dreamt gerund
tumbling innocent as a dervish or a prophet’s puppy. 
but mostly, penetrating entity, it is how you teach me
to come over and over and over again so almost
lovingly to the divine, despite all the Earth’s profanity.

Jennifer Bradpiece was born and raised in the multifaceted muse, Los Angeles, California, where she still resides. Her passion is collaborating with multi-media artists on projects. Her poetry has been published in various anthologies, journals, and online zines, including Redactions, Mush Mum, and The Common Ground Review. She has poetry forthcoming in The Bacopa Literary Review and Moria, among others. Jennifer’s manuscript, Lullabies for End Times will be forthcoming in early 2020 by Moon Tide Press.