Leia K Bradley

Enough Is for Fools

Looking up beneath your turret,
I could crawl up your rose bush, gash scratch bleeding, and still
you would tell me the evidence of being alive is not enough. Lately you have been reading
Hegel. You have been less and less in need of small amounts of anything—breakfast,
blood. It is no longer about being enough
but about showing you what parts of me are measurable.
I tell you the real estate of my body (the skin of one human adds up to 21 square feet) and
the mileage, too (11 miles of blood vessels). But you don’t want numerical values,
you want nasturtium and three steaks for dinner. You want
a life so big I could never escape it, to know I’m yours
because there is no one and nowhere to run to. You rake your hands down my thighs
like I am lucky you didn’t nail my knees to the chair. We are doing domesticity
at a hundred and sixty miles an hour. We are swallowing the coal
of our own industrialization of love. Just stop, I tell you. Just
let it be enough, but
you kill the bugs, you chop the rutabagas, you’re no fool, and
you tell me so. Cast iron kissing butter,
your dark hair curls past your shoulders
like ravens flying headlong into a house fire. All that smoke,
all that reveling ruin. Don’t you know
I wish for more, too, I tell you, but you aren’t listening. You just
take off all your clothes and walk out to the backyard
while the meat gives away its pink.
Looking up at the moon, looking back at me.
Don’t you know I wish for more, too? I yell back at you, at the shape of a life
the size of a kitchen window.
But we both know we won’t find it
inside this.

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Leia K Bradley (they/she) is a backwoods Georgia born, Brooklyn based lesbian writer, performance artist and an MFA Poetry candidate at Columbia University, where she also teaches Writing in Gender & Sexuality. She has work out now or forthcoming in POETRY, Variant, Aurore, Ghost City, JMWW, trampset, Peach Fuzz, Full House Literary, Cutbow Quarterly, West Trade Review, Black Warrior Review and more, with her poem "Settle(d)" chosen as the Editor's Choice Best Overall pick for Penumbra Magazine's 2022 Pride issue. She was nominated by Miniskirt Magazine for a Pushcart Prize for her lesbian werewolf short story "Moon Pie" and is the 2023 Featured Author of Anodyne Magazine. After climbing out from the coffin of her first divorce, she is accepting love and lust letters through her twitter @LeiaKBradley or instagram @MadameMort