Brandel France de Bravo
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Taking Dictation
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I’m Berlusconi minus the pomade, Putin’s twenty bottles
of vodka and birthday mash note. You’re one of my five
real friends. Just as a poet always writes for other poets,

an authoritarian is only authentic with their own kind.
“Expropriate that!” I shout like Chavez as I walk the streets
checking for my portrait in every government office.

I’m Bokassa sans crocodiles, a Mobutu who lacks branding:
The all-powerful warrior who because of his endurance
and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest,

leaving fire in his wake. Last night, I dreamed I woke up
to tiny dusty footprints marching across my bedroom floor:
hard-soled shoes with pointy toes. Auguring? I’m not sure.

I’m Ceaușescu without the scepter or bronze yak from Mao,
running a police state the size of Candyland. Being feared
is often confused with being loved. If only I could dictate that.

Make me magnetic, let me thrill to being groped, grabbed
from an oversized suit pocket, stripped of my envelope, pawed
for all to see. Pull comes with push, you say? I’ll take that.
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I’m Kim Jong-un’s letter with nothing but memories on my back.
Even in exile, I’m a star. I can do anything. Watch me burn down
this gulag they call archives. Hot blue, red giant, white dwarf.

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Brandel France de Bravo is the author of Locomotive Cathedral (forthcoming from Backwaters Press, University of Nebraska), Provenance, and the chapbook Mother, Loose. Her poems and essays have appeared in 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Conduit, The Georgia Review, Seneca Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. She teaches a meditation program developed at Stanford University called Compassion Cultivation Training.©

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