Explore
Memoryexpand_moreYour words will strike her heart like Saint Teresa’s flaming arrow.
Kansas is a cold dessert, I say. No, Kansas is a tongue depressor, he says.
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
It wasn’t clear if there was an outside world to our outside world.
I never felt heart stop or skin burn, just the first split second of sound.
No fields of gold. No ripe. One hill, no wave, no roll. I am billboards.
If life is an open vein, what’s brave about a sleeve-heart, sweetheart?
Two surgeons vaulted over a counter to hold open my incisions.
My first true love was Underwood, my mother’s typewriter.
Men came over carrying lanterns and pulled away the chunks of ice.
Let me lie down with you and listen, let me tell you what I know.
She takes her hand to my scalp: eyes close as if tasting lemon cake.
Tanya jokes that she comes to the East Coast now only for funerals.
Turns out my body’s a dollar sweet potato, her screen said.
ursula says she’s seen everyone she loves in an apple, save herself.
When the population was whiter, they fawned over the Korean.
He’d always wanted to kiss her thigh dimples but never dared.
“No, no,” we say. “We’re fine! Really! We love things just the way they are!”
I remember speaking to Allison who asked me if I wanted to be a girl.
They rose before us under a halo of lights like figures in a shrine.
What I really meant to say is that I am tired. Beauty can demand so much.
Once, when young and proud, I tried to grasp the enormity of the past.
She fell out of her own composition, fell and landed flat on her face.
