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published November 2009

Brad Davis was laid off in August. He now coordinates educational programming for Sylvester Manor, a 350 year old family estate and organic farm on Shelter Island, NY. (Seriously: check it out.) His poems have been published in places like DoubleTake, Image, Poetry, Paris Review, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, Connecticut Review, yada-yada-yada. Two are forthcoming in Chautauqua. He has four books from Antrim House, and a chapbook that won the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize. Brad and esposa Deb live (for now) in Pomfret, Connecticut. They have one son who has one wife who together live in Brooklyn, New York. All with gratitude.

From Here I Cannot Say What Kind It Is

by

To draw off the cat, a bird
flails in the grass, feigns
weak­ness to dis­tract from
an actual weak­ness.
Something I admire.
But for his go-to-town shirts,
blue to mimic workingman’s
blue, B. Brecht paid dearly
to have them tai­lored in silk.
A dif­fer­ent kind of con.
Like P. Picasso’s ride:
in appear­ance ple­beian—
the quin­tes­sence of
taxi—in point of fact, purely
and pri­vately, lim­ou­sine.
Hardly the coital trem­ble
sim­u­lated to divert
atten­tion from a partner’s
poverty of sta­mina
and/or tech­nique. I get dizzy
try­ing to sort it all out:
the dif­fer­ence between sav­ing
another’s and sav­ing one’s own.