Bully, blood, and unicorns in leaves and snow by Lee Bradbury Am I falling (you remember Michael Hammond fell on me, don’t you, that cocksmokin fucko, we kicked the blue fuckyou outta each other all through elementary school, cause Mike was dumb, stocky, stupid, dumb jerko jock loser, your classic bully, me I was a . . . intellectual, and he came at me one day in fifth grade, he was in fourth cause he was too dumb to pass multiplication, and he waits, he comes at me outside Ms. Boyette’s room and tackled me down on the breezeways, gray damn gray ass gray shadowy shadowy yet unbroken and the stillness gave no token of that lie thy soul hath spoken, I have got to stop smokin this shit here—gray around a courtyard where it was snowin on the little cement benches and the satyr pissin out his mouth into the birdbath, and the snow was fallin and it had just come middle of fall and the leaves were fallin with the snow, maple leaves and sycamore leaves flashin gold red brown gray, gray fallin out gray sky flitterin in with the snow, big ol’ puffflakes and Michael Hammond comes barrelin outta the dark places of the buildn across the courtyard and bowls me over and my head hits concrete and Mike starts punchin it right in the temple and I’m tryin to get up, so my head’s just bouncing off the concrete, one, four times and then that P.E. guy, whass the hell, Mr. Horner, he comes grabs Mike and shoves him off and yanks me up, and Mike’s up like fuckin Dracula, man, like a demon comin back at me and he’s holdin em off and gimme the weed, man—yeah, I said blunt—ahhhhwww jumpin fuckin Jesus on a palomino I swat Horner’s hand off my head and pop im right up in the balls and he falls outta the way and I go at Mike like a fuckin Vikin—well, Jeezummm Cripe Christ, I mean they didn’t even list us overdue for mordn a week, cause the Featherstorm horses had taken the cheese to Aldemarle—cause I hit him three good ones while he was swingin n missin, long loopin haymakers, and I dipped inside of em and gave im a right to the cheek n he stumbles and a left uppercut right up the side of his face n he leans gimme the slapgallopin weed, man, he leans in for a swipe n I threw a right uppercut that missed everything, and then when my elbow was comin it up it it caught im right up the center of his nose and broke it open, broke the damn bone and everything, and the snow was sugarin our blood and no one was comin near us now, the snow fallin all around our faces and fists like raspberry French toast with sugar on it and the leaves roooooooood the leaves were real fretty pallin, pallin, fretty pallin ffretty pretty—fallin in the snow and that butterfat bastard was screamin n grabbin at his face and he fell right over that little wall into the snow, n he’s writhin n screamin, beatin, rollin around in the snow, and the snow’s stringin all red roooood rood red like some kinda leafy Jesusfall doin his dolorosa, and then, well, what the hell, man, I mean you’re a civilian, you got no cause to sort this shit out, yougn go back to your flower garden n your wife butterfat goosegirl bounced in a gambo bed, goddamn this weed is lemon fatabulous, lemon garlic, n you got, I mean this is a prose poem, it ain’t got to make sense, and wait a minute wait a minute you ain’t heard shit yet cause that’s when the unicorns showed up, come fallin outta the gray sky real slow like they were floatin, like they were comin down a waterrise, in all the leaf fritters, that’s a waterfall that goes up, and they’re floatin like giant horse colorrain, all brown and white, n red, purple manes n green blue spangled dark brown, delicious things I ever saw, I wanted to be friends with em, all plump and sleek and saltglistenin, and they were all muscle, there’s no fat on em, swishin their tails in the snowleaffallautumnsky Jesus marchin the cross up to Michael Hammond and cartin im off the courtyard and I went n petted the yu—I’m not makin this up—n I went pettin the unicorns in the snow n dint I tell ya they’d lick em off my blood) outta this chair? Lee Bradbury is an English graduate student concentrating on poetry in the creative writing shadow realm. He was born in Wilson, NC and grew up in Kinston, NC, where he lives. He enjoys writing, playing chess, eating doughnuts, petting horses, good ol’ fashioned nature, and though he has never pet a lion, that's high on his agenda. His favorite writers are Homer, Cicero, Shakespeare, Milton, Poe, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Dickens, and he listens exclusively to Classical music, especially Bach. Bradbury does not own any horses or lions or unicorns. He is too irresponsible and absent-minded. But he has never smoked marijuana. About “Bully, blood, and unicorns in leaves and snow,” he says “This prose poem is as much a stream of consciousness as I can achieve, though it progresses too logically for my taste, and it is primarily concerned with a single episode from childhood when I had to fight off a bully. The events of that scene have been embellished a tad as written, but it did happen. The diction is an amalgam of the fancy and oral rhetorics, with a splash of metaliterature (‘gimme the weed,’ etc.) for which the anomalous rhetoric is famous. I was impeled to write the content as such in order to flower up the scenery and fashion the storyline as fallaciously absurd as I could. The imagery of snow and leaves falling at the same time appeared garish, and thus, good—and multicolored unicorns? What could it hurt? Potheads like to talk about food; why, then, French toast, of course. This prose poem was primarily inspired by Barthelme's ‘Sentence,’ which loops back around on itself.” Copyright © 2005 by Lee Bradbury. Photo by Leanne E. Smith.