![]() Conor Bracken is the author of Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Competition, and translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine's Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, 2019). His poems and translations appear (or will soon) in places like 32 Poems, BOMB, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Waxwing, and elsewhere. An assistant poetry editor at Four Way Review, he teaches English at the University of Findlay. THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO TO A MAN
is pity him. The drowsy daffodil of his exhausted cock, the padlocks of his hands wrung open and equably useless-- how pathetic is all you have to mutter to crack him. How sad it must have been to have the god of his parents be a flame that incinerated each desire it tried to anneal and how sad for him his parents never noticed the ash heap rising in his chest and how they didn’t care enough to muzzle their god long enough to ask him why he kept the ash alone inside him and sometimes cleared in it the vague angelic shape of the first man who forced himself on him. What sorrow to never have the chance to say it was to see if the wind is still too weak to blow the ash away which it always is and isn’t that pitiful? Poor man, his little boyhood so much stronger than he is. Wrestling him into thinking he is the sole half-troubled maverick to swagger from the ship wreck of his past, extracting as he strides from the ad-hoc leather scabbard of his body the splinters he will drive under the ocean’s rough unvarnished nails.
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