Street Names I Hate, Including Monroe
I’m waiting for this car to pass, the kind I see often:
pictograph windows, artists in the backseat,
calculating how to drive a mother mad.
It’s Kimbrough Street, and there’s enough love here
to keep the cars running at all hours.
On nights I want to cross the sidewalk
and look inside every house and see
how everything works, what cog is spinning,
and who that cog is. I’ve been walking further
every night, past Scenic, and over Walnut.
When I first left home I walked the entire town,
looking for somewhere I might fit.
I found women who invited me inside for years.
On Battlefield, some on Monroe.
Most put me out after days, left me thinking
if I should continue. Age makes stopping easier,
when your brakes long for that old screeching noise,
the familiar clap of people finding one another
in the wreckage, by Cherry Street, or on Lone Pine.
Today
Today my cat smothered her kittens
while I was at work so of course
I thought about my mother.
I thought about how she could be kind
on those rare days when she didn't
hate my father, when we would gather
and watch George Romero movies
and laugh at the rubber chickens
being plucked from a man's belly.
Every mother is cruel,
so I will not accuse her of anything.
Know that she held my hand
whenever we stood at my brother's grave,
and that she kissed my forehead
all the times it really mattered,
when no one else was looking.
Anthony Isaac Bradley's stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Slipstream, Penduline Press, SLAB, Main Street Rag, Weave, Moon City Review, Cave Region Review, Elder Mountain, and The MacGuffin. He was a finalist in the Moon City Review 2011 Short Story Contest, judged by Kevin Brockmeier. Anthony studies creative writing at Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri, where he lives with his cat and the ghost of another.