J.M. BRAUN
- somameishengfrazie
- May 30
- 7 min read
J.M. Braun's work has appeared and is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Fiction International, Puerto del Sol, DIAGRAM, filling Station, Yalobusha Review, Bayou Magazine, and elsewhere. Braun is a 2024 graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where they won the John Logan Poetry Prize.
NIGHTCAP
before the night fulfills itself a barfight’s thrown elbow
knocks my head into dreaming and in these dreams
my brother runs about the size of our father I dream
his eyes are socket wrenches and he coughs spackle
my brother’s meanness loses itself to a darker part
of his shadow brooding atop a ridge a handmade cupola
in this dream my brother fathers and it almost seems
after long enough we become our names upon waking
corner-swept into a cobwebbed booth with a canvas
jacket that smells the way rain tastes long past time
for lights to come up until off for good I stumble over
this noiseless dancefloor to no father in sight and behind
the stick find a dishwasher rinsing out the evening
he takes me by the hand out to the mark of a bloodtrail
into the woods red to those fields beyond red he says
tragically this here is where you begin as he began
my reflection in a garbage can backs this truth well
into the treeline beneath limbs thick with starlight
again into the countryside where men tackle cattle
in a field to another meadow going through in my mind
how much in him does our father have to let out of him
when the trail tapers off to a gutted barn I can smell
a tin pail of crawdads rotting under the leaves what is this
some kind of boyhood home some kind of hideaway
something in me tells me this place is my father himself
with no father in any paddock to tell me like he once did
that when the man guts the animal he is the animal
FOR ANY NIGHT NEAREST THIS ONE
my brother my brother
now here we must see it through
no egress from beneath
the tallest shortleaf pines
no backing from our own culling
from this curiosity built in us young
under moon rilles light
plying all night with hand rakes
with trowels with spades
two brothers two gardeners
on a plot barred by fenceposts
to scrape the scar widens the scar
to redress the wound is to shroud
the infection already blooming
when up to here in clay unearthed
somewhere a cattle lows
a screech owl makes half its name
our keen wants not this night
when the rest of it is only is only
the terrible creak of nails worked
out of a coffin with a butter knife
IF EVER WE BUILD THIS HOUSE
we will leave messages in these deepening ruts
in those treads stamped by pickups passing us by
in palm-floored honks to let us know they know us
and us not them we will tack these the messages
into dogwoods and if not us if not we
then at least myself an I I hardly know yet
writing with the hand with a bar rag around it
to where the nail entered a pry bar freed me up
like brother said it only hurt a touch only a little
as for the messages the sundry notes unwound
along a crop to catch against a fence
they will say do not pass here as we will not
pass here again this house at best a putaway game
all bandsaws all sawhorses tucked into forgetfulness
house of no more spackle or caulk a house shaped a skull
without a frame to drywall or fistmade hole to mend
with sallow faces in the yard our father’s too
admiring a last handiwork nobody could call artful
if ever we build this house if ever our lights go out
I will say long after I had a family then
I will cast these ones on pathways along cinder paths
watches taken by birdflock tapestry on treebark
now as no one I have ever been maybe
for a try at a second go-around I will nail my hand
to a power pole let it show I will work for work
if only to say to somebody can you help myself
carry this load if only to tell them tell anyone at all
brother or not brother I will see you in the morning
OURS
all winter on this lost road
we lie ourselves down again
huddled close as if to a stove
to roadkill whose insides
steam us up a last warmth
from here we watch our fathers
we watch with eyes pecked out
by gulls our lids sutured closed
by the angler with fishing line
they are on the river again
overcoated and snowblind
weeping with heads bent
as cattails into augered holes
down in a city of ice shanties
the masks they wear they wear
over faces like dreams unveiled
bonemen no less stripped than
the fish whose skin they shuck
whose scales spread starlike
on cork-holding hands degloved
we know them we have seen them
only for now they are shapeless
figures at best outlines at most
faraway as each gas flare alight
and are backlit by above slag heaps
burning along the opposite shoreline
call these fires the nearest of our heat
the closest to a spring the sunspot
of a woman our fathers call Mother
even away from them we see them
when down at Mr. Sturgeon’s Hook
& Bait Shop where men in cardplay
throw over and over again snake eyes
when down among inked tombstones
at the snowed-over cemetery our bodies
begin to stack up in at no burial in sight
we see them behind our sockets then
on fractured ice with chests warmed
by all-day nightcaps and lungs to fog
the air breath steaming like a deer
fingers fishhook-cut eyes sleepless
desperate for a sun any sun at all
we wait for them to return to us
we ask whoever’s in charge to break
the river a freighter an icebreaker
to auger open this river’s heart
to loose the ice into floes and crests
of whitecaps to send our fathers home
only instead we go to them ourselves
our fathers a slew of sleepwalkers
with bucketfuls of perch and walleye
we run out to meet them and them us
over a river slick with snowmelt
too far to see their faces and still
we call out to them our fathers
calling ours calling this one’s ours
this one I tell you belongs to me
ON COMES THE LIGHT
I. Worksite
tonight over our house mostly a frame house
under a moon a red-tailed hawk carries off
my brother and I lie in a world of mud
so late this time when truckfuls of men
in flatbeds our father calls the help
swing their headlights into our yard
halogen lamps lanterns and floodlights
men on ends carry them across planks
laid down to step on across the mud yard
they run extension cords snakelike orange
they haul shingles in stacks on pallets
they bring siding to weave the seams of
now let us tell you with our bottoms planted
on this glassless sill my brother spitting into
a rainwater puddle and I toeing the house
when he shakes a hand he shakes a hand
our father out to meet them makes one
bulb-carrying man drop his milkcrate
a thousand shards to glint sharp in what
light they brought for an all night pickup
a piece by piece taking-out from bootsoles
not long now before the beer cans pile up
even less when our father climbs an oak to
the roof where he takes potshots at the moon
our father he makes the drunk men nervous
the way he waves a nailgun in want of a hand
how he up on the roof dances without music
with all night callouts for the help to come on
up and join him in this gathering of us and don
your suits straighten your ties and so on so soon
when our help backs off makes their excuses
load their lights in trucks they pile into oh
brother look how they head this night home
II. Brothers
through the woods across our acres
we bathe in the river we drown
our heads in depths the surf our suds
washed up on shore
we play pretend
my brother a dead man facedown
I the barge man stoking his flesh
with a long-hooked gaff
from far off we hear our father
how he works the bandsaw tonight
how he splits wood to shape into frames
his sawdust in the current meets our bodies
when thunderheads rock the sky gray
a front moves in a shoreline rainspotted dark
we are already rain we are already dead
we put our clothes on wet we splash barefooted
back to the house where the mud is mudded more
we only muck ourselves up again kneeling
digging trenches with spoons around the house
we protect our father from the rain while he works
by stormbreak we are brothers made of mud
every hour of ours night or day light or dark
we are brothers we have always been mud
III. Our Father to Make
beneath him my brother holds the ladder
while I fetch his wants to hand up to him
or I do the holding my brother the handing
either way we shine a light where light isn’t
we hand him up nail boxes claw hammers
jarfuls of moondust pry bars paint swatches
bent coathangers to fill our closets with
we give lacquer brushes and drip cloths
my brother asks me what else do we have
we have a posthole digger for a mailbox
we have driftwood to burn for stardust
we have swatches to get the paint right
what else what else do we have to give
we give each of our hands up to shake
our father says no not you I didn’t ask
for you wait who’s holding the ladder
IV. Night Today
bedtime in our nightclothes our sockfeet
our father is the light beneath our door
that doesn’t exist yet he is the sound of
workboots on plywood flooring and in
the breath smell of my brother beside me
all night the sound of hammers and saws
all night the blowdown wind beats outside
insulation candied pink itches us asleep
for dreams of a house to live our days in
dreams of a far-off place called waking
worlds hardly come out of when we find
our father’s Carharrt jacket put over us
in the night to keep us brothers warm