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My lust works like the tides pulling in reverse, controlled by a simple ballast.

A sociopathic streak on my father’s side I try to put to good use.

The pen is mightier than the sword in the fretwork of a poet’s language.

Charlie wasn’t Lena’s first love, but he counted on being her last.

I tell my sister what I didn’t tell my father, I love you. Please, don’t die.

“Oh, Jesus.” It’s the greatest shame since 1929’s stock market.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

I know which home takes the turning, which mind washes in hot water.

My own hunger was for a reduction in the vast space between people.

My own hunger was for a reduction in the vast space between people.

They cut you off, let fall your hammered silver bracelets to the sand.

Your friends are sniffing glue from a paper bag in the back of an Impala.

I love scientists. They’re trying their hardest. And they just want love.

Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden was edited by Tom Jenks.

It seemed to her that they only ever touched each other in transient, sudden ways.

It is the night of whores and monsters, but without the killings.

Ajax can answer all this killing only with the killing of himself.

Slice a finger while opening a beer can, fizz the gin high in tumblers.

We press closer to look at a picture: a handcuffed boy leaning toward us.

Let him search, Tricia thought, who knew what he might discover.

“The doors are closed,” she said, and we would not be flying to Paris.

Neither fame nor wealth could provide consolation for life’s brevity.

She wears her nakedness like it has been woven from air.

Lebanon’s sky was full of stars. The sky here doesn’t have any stars.

In the many pages of the book of love this is only one story.

Not all his children love themselves. Look at little Adrienne.

My “lonelymaking.” Also known as my horrible secret, continent-wide.

A homecoming, she says, as if you hadn’t been back in decades.

I slept but never dreamed there. Nor did I feel the need to court a god.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram