MICHAEL K. BRANTLEY - POEMS

Michael K. Brantley is the author of Galvanized: The Unlikely Odyssey of a Reluctant Carolina Confederate (Univ. of Nebraska Press, forthcoming), and Memory Cards: Portraits from a Rural Journey (BRW, 2015). He is an English professor, a photographer, and a blessed liver transplant recipient.  Michael lives with his family of writers and historians in eastern North Carolina.

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Angel Baby
​

​The house sits alone and still,
plain and white on the last blind rise
of Highway 27, like a station long abandoned.
It sighs and shrugs when I pass.
Distinguished from the countless others,
it perches on the shoulders of a brick wall.
 
Whenever I was late leaving the university,
The stop was one of many.
I waited impatiently behind the lumbering yellow bus,
As you carefully crossed under your mother’s watch,
The rest of the afternoon yours
To do as you please.
 
I had the day off when I heard on the news
what happened that morning.
You did as you always had,
Crossed the asphalt to meet the awaiting day.
The truck’s driver was
Going too fast, and then it was too late.
 
I passed quietly, slowly
the next day, out of respect.
The heat and the pain
Flooded down into the road,
Into my car, the dirt, the grass,
The house wept.
 
All looked the same,
Tidied up by those who do that,
Nothing amiss, no evidence,
Except on the brick wall
A memorial in white paint began
Simply enough:
 
Angel Baby,
We miss you
We love you.
I shed tears, three in all I wiped,
A trinity for your mother, for you
For my own Angel Baby.

 

Flirt
​

​In the quiet of the library
 
She laughs and touches my arm,
It was no accident.
 
She giggles and twists a curl,
and I feel the fine hairs on my arm rise.
 
She withdraws quickly
but not that quickly
 
A glance shared, awkward
Her smile betrays intent.
 
She talks but I don’t hear,
Distracted by a hint of perfume
Disarmed by hazel eyes,
Near perfect skin, heat radiates.
 
Desire can be so impolite
What I want and think,
She of course knows,
And so she leans forward
 
and touches me again.

Waiting 
​

​I wait
in the morning heat
of late summer
Already uncomfortable
in the day I’m wearing.
 
Others wait with me,
engaged with small, black boxes
Connected to the world at large
but not the world at hand.
 
This is not what I had in mind,
to be standing here
After all these years,
Time having slipped through my fingers.
 
I cough once, then again
wondering if it is the lingering fumes
Or the failures
That leave me wanting for breath.
 
I consider my life
Has not been about living,
but about the next ride.
I see
 
the bus pull to the curb.
I decide
to take the next one,
So I wait.

Borrowed Dream
​

​One day I awoke
and found that life
had slipped away,
not like a thief
in the night,
but like the water
from a stream
that I gather in cupped hands
to quench my thirst.
 
I had borrowed
someone else’s dream,
only to be shaken from it
startled like a child
who falls from a bike
for the first time.
 
I wanted to dream again,
a new one,
one of my own,
but could not find sleep.
 
Instead, restless,
I sat awake,
with heavy eyes,
a troubled heart
and the pressure
of Papa’s elephants
on my chest.
 
My sleeplessness became
my new dream,
alternate parts
nightmare and
redemption.
 
I worry that my loss
has robbed those around me
of sleep, of their own dreams,
that I have
taken something that
cannot be returned,
broken something that
cannot be fixed,
until I dream again.