Explore

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.

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

Kansas is a cold dessert, I say. No, Kansas is a tongue depressor, he says.

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

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

No fields of gold. No ripe. One hill, no wave, no roll. I am billboards.

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

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

I never felt heart stop or skin burn, just the first split second of sound.

It wasn’t clear if there was an outside world to our outside world.

I try to believe that even when cords are cut or people die we connect.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

She only eats condiments, pickles, slices of sharp cheddar.

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

Our brains interpolate from surrounding images, fooling us.

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

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

The coverage of the state funeral, black horse bearing an empty saddle.

Dan Gerber reads poems of boyhood, and from the end of his mother’s life.

Two surgeons vaulted over a counter to hold open my incisions.