Senator Minotaur thinks of the only boy he kissed, the one who wanted to fly and eventually did. The Senator remembers the sea salt on the boy’s neck, the boy’s hands on the small of the Senator’s back after, a goodbye before the boy attempted his escape from their labyrinthian orphanage. The Senator tried swimming out to where the boy fell but his arms quit a quarter of the way. The Senator’s position on marriage has always been that it’s between a male and a female, his campaign manager says to a reporter; the Senator struggles not to correct him.
J. Bradley’s work has appeared in numerous literary journals including decomP, Hobart, and Prairie Schooner. He was the Interviews Editor of PANK, the Flash Fiction Editor of NAP, and the Web Editor of Monkeybicycle. He is the author of the poetry collection Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books, 2009), the novella Bodies Made of Smoke (HOUSEFIRE, 2012), the graphic poetry collection The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014), illustrated by Adam Scott Mazer, the prose poem chapbook It Is A Wild Swing Of A Knife (Choose the Sword Press, 2015), the flash fiction chapbook No More Stories About The Moon (Lucky Bastard Press, 2016), the novel The Adventures of Jesus Christ, Boy Detective (Pelekinesis, 2016) and the Yelp review prose poem collection Pick How You Will Revise A Memory (Robocup Press, 2016). His flash fiction chapbook, Neil, won Five Quarterly‘s 2015 e-chapbook contest for fiction. His story, “Kyle”, was selected for Wigleaf‘s top 50 (very) short fictions for 2016. He is the curator of the Central Florida reading series There Will Be Words. He received his MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University.