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

If life is an open vein, what’s brave about a sleeve-heart, sweetheart?

I want to sleep in a bed next to a man who won’t dream of me all night.

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

After you have read all you possibly can there may be a few lines left.

Just because we have birds inside us, we don’t have to be cages.

Even this says nothing of your desire—to be put to use.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Your words will strike her heart like Saint Teresa’s flaming arrow.

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

In that world I was a fish too eager to enter the nets; here, I’m a river.

What’s left is a thumbhouse, an inch of gristle inside skin walls.

What will we do without exile, and a long night that stares at the water?

The waves of laughters breach an inlet of cumulus and I’m excited.

God was surrounding the chair, leaves flourishing from a sickly tree.

Corn repeats itself into a haze of tassels and sheaving leaves.

You can stand on the edge and tremble with fear or risk your life.

The world seemed newly made and filled with a frightening silence.

I repeated the name thoughtfully, then said no, I didn’t think I knew her.

The portal light, on your face, now, a rose light on a sinking freighter.

The sense all along has been that there’s some madness in her.

I don’t know you, I only think of you to ignore how unhappy I am.

Let me lie down with you and listen, let me tell you what I know.

We could use our arms to squeeze or hold or load not a gun, not a gun.

She takes her hand to my scalp: eyes close as if tasting lemon cake.

When the population was whiter, they fawned over the Korean.

The kissed fingerpad touched wet with wine orbiting.

If every cowboy has a sad song, I’m afraid you are mine to perform.

I am uneasy with the thrusting of green shoots outside in the night.

I am the king of doing wheelies on the Stingray bicycle of my mind.