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  • Miniature Horse
  • Bradley Harrison (bio)

Gorilla man choked my brother in the pantry. For clinking a spoon on his teeth. Every day Blarney killed a coon and carried it up. To the deck where he’d ripped Adam’s leg to the marrow. Polaroids milky his shin with black rust and the lawsuit. Gorilla Man says Adam’s mom is a meth head. Before making me gather the stones from her garden. I hit all of his golf balls out into the pasture. I thought I had found them when the miniature horse. Beau died intestines snaked from his asshole Gorilla Man says. He swallowed one you must have missed. He stood on the deck in his spandex shorts. Thick bent dick pulse beating my mother. Nodding behind him in her flannel bathrobe. Gorilla man says stop eating like a nigger. Says you’re lying to me when I wasn’t. I threw rocks at parked tractors I shot swallows with my pellet gun. Before my seventh grade football games he taped both my ankles. On the gate of his pickup. His hands leather hammers I learned how to throw. My neighbor Chesley told me his mom told him. To stay away from Gorilla Man that he’d shoved toothpicks one. By one in the four year old ass of his previous son I was ten. Then building a dam in the creek behind the house. Gathering branches moss chicken wire against some steel. Posts already staked in the bed it was raining. Dead dogs I ran into the woods. Should have checked first for stakes but I didn’t. I just jumped. [End Page 7]

Bradley Harrison

Bradley Harrison is a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin. His work can be found in Gulf Coast, CutBank, the Los Angeles Review, Hunger Mountain, New Orleans Review, Best New Poets 2012, and elsewhere. His chapbook Diorama of a People, Burning is available from Ricochet Editions (2012).

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