Two Poems by Jo Bratten

Women speaking about Marlon Brando for 15 Minutes

Underground between stations on a stopped tube listening 
to the sound of Mars and if you close your eyes 
you are back underwater in the bath, you are nothing 

more than water in the bath, someone’s heart 
rushing through you like wind across the skin 
of a hostile planet. On Mars your blood would literally boil.

In bed at midnight watching a livestream 
from a rattlesnake den in Colorado. They sleep, mostly, 
their bodies rippling and surging, cold

tides of blood. They are sleeping in the sun 
gently looped between thick arms of rock and I am 
trying to remember what desire feels like. 

I can’t stop watching this video called 
‘Women speaking about Marlon Brando for 15 minutes’ 
which is 15 minutes and 26 seconds long. 

So beautiful, they say, but oh my god 
a very wounded person, very damaged person, just 
[Rita Moreno makes explosion sounds].

In Colorado the snakes are still sleeping 
and upstairs my neighbour is pressing her lovers’ 
names to the night like luminescent stickers. 

She has a whole galaxy up there.

Lapidation

In the sepia evenings of early summer
my sister and I repair to the driveway 

in tentative dark, sort our rocks into even piles, 
test their weight in our hands like experts 

and, free from technological distraction, 
throw rocks at other rocks and watch 

them spark like fireflies. Something to do 
with quartz in the stone, fractoluminescence

or maybe triboluminescence – a breaking 
of a bonded charge into opposites: positive,

negative. Late summer changes air to dust 
and ash. In dry afternoons we throw rocks 

at cars in the junkyard left to rust, smash 
windows into sequinned puddles, glitter 

piles; knife tyres for the pleasure of feeling 
steel penetrate rubber; shatter wing 

mirrors so our faces fracture; the cars 
give up, crumple like saints or fallen

women, while we, fleeing, catch the shadow 
of a Saul holding our coats, or maybe a man 

stooping silently to write with his finger in the dirt 
something momentous that we cannot see.

Jo Bratten's debut pamphlet, Climacteric, was published in 2022 by Fly on the Wall Press. Her poetry has appeared in And Other Poems, The London Magazine, Magma, Poetry Birmingham, Poetry London, Poetry Wales and Under the Radar amongst others. She lives in London.