Our united way represents a perverse
drop in misunderstanding, and escort duties
have helped perfect my attempt
to support myself. Still, I fell tragically
short of my bare bones in the hot plains
of central India, south of the city of Agra.
The Ancient Time Sheet noted 32 hours
of Accrued Leave, but my actual AL is
the simple yogic trick of disappearing,
and despite my thanks for the postcard
of names, it’s doubtful we will be
the four T’s—Tara, Tilak, Tulku and
Ty—as lately we’ve “lost our principle Hand, Aquila Rose,
by death.” Please let Anne Veeraraghavan
know the women of Benares have skin
like a warm, silty river and sometimes cook
for tourists on orange and turquoise houseboats.
And don’t discount the men of Benares
with their saintly three big meals a day.
Rama grew and grew. He ate
down the western seaboard all the way to Mumbai. |
Robin Bradford is a poet, fiction writer and essayist. Her poetry chapbook is entitled Confidence. Her poems have appeared most recently in Mudfish Review and the Texas Poetry Calendar and are forthcoming in The Texas Observer and Friends Journal: A Quaker Magazine. Her literary honors include the Dobie Paisano Fellowship for Texas Writers, O. Henry Award, Texas Literature Grant and a Community Sabbatical Grant from the University of Texas Humanities Institute. Bradford works as communications director at Austin Community Foundation. www.robinbradford.space.
Timothy Bradford is the author of the poetry collection Nomads with Samsonite (BlazeVOX [books], 2011) and the introduction to Sadhus (Cuerpos Pintados, 2003), a photography book on the ascetics of South Asia. Recent work has appeared in ATTN:, No Assholes, Halvard Johnson’s Truck, Atticus Review/Boo’s Hollow, Art Focus Oklahoma, This Land, The Oklahoma Review, and Upstairs at Duroc. He cofounded Short Order Poems in 2014 with Chad Reynolds and is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University.
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