They Obliterate Us with their Aerobatics of Language and Rhythm

My brother used to build these rockets we’d launch when we were kids that would blast up into the atmosphere forever. We searched and searched to find out if its explosive magic would ever manifest in the vacant lot where we stood staring up into the sky. We were sure it had found its way to another planet, but then somehow this white, phallic-shaped thing would plummet back down into our world again, intact but with burn marks, changed. That’s what happens when you pack together the right ingredients. You come up with an implosion of the spontaneously combustible kind. Ryan W. Bradley and David Tomaloff are that kind of ammunition. They obliterate us with their aerobatics of language and rhythm that bring us back to ourselves. We can imagine that we have escaped, but forget that you are a mammal and you had better watch your back.

the afternoon is a tourist   a noose

with its arms spread out like a clock

when it is Sunday afternoon   I make believe.

play the part of the father left rotting in the den

a half empty glass for the fifth time today

the dampened spark of ice cubes failing to ignite

this is a time capsule raised from barren soil

the aging bomb shelter of the nuclear family —

Bradley and Tomaloff mesmerize us with their transmission of cadence and meter. It’s music, improvisation with the volume turned all the way up, quadraphonic sound and we’re standing trying to hold ourselves together in the midst of it.

where then is the skin

we peeled from one another,

the would be bone-clothes

in which we earned our scars?

what we struggled so long to support,

to cut our teeth on failure

building a better ribcage

to house a more broken heart.

You Are Jaguar is two hands shaking in the woods, two voices wandering in our heads stretching the territory we didn’t know we spanned, a dueling navigation of subterfuge that surfaces and exposes itself within every stanza.

draining like suburban gutters

into the careful concealment

of flowerbeds below . . .

& with it go my teeth

cut for hurricanes,

holding fast to the edges,

of the photos we’ve become:

This is a collection that blasts through us with the violation of our truths. There is nowhere to go but inward. We must own the beauty and debauchery of the animals that we are.

. . . if you are the mandible,  I am

the mouth swallowed whole   I am

the glint in the city’s eye   recapturing

a sense of   how to crave the jungle.

Bradley and Tomaloff are packing in the ammo and setting off the fuse. Get a copy of You Are Jaguar and find out where you land; scorched, yet transformed.