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Now he chuckles with the sea, stitched within its timeless jive.

Let father be a man walking to the river, ready to bargain with water.

“I don’t care how tired we are. I’m not not having sex on my wedding night.”

She had felt to him like some floating spirit of who she used to be.

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

How do you beat a man who refuses to rise from a puddle of his own blood.

Everyone has something lodged and jittering inside them.

The first murder had been a half dozen years ago in a warmer city.

References to and portrayals of hypocrisy, moral sloth, venery.

Who needs driftwood when I can bury myself in your loamy soil.

My love swims you, your shoulders like hard sails under the green curls.

He knew what those friends were worth: he knew the girls too.

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

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

The night shower is a personal pan-blizzard, a folklore-free zone.

The angel lay in his body effervescent as a flake of alabaster.

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

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

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

A simple line of raging wet nearby, how as a kid I pictured the Nile.

I feel them slice me open and tug, then I smell my own innards burning.

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

Our brains interpolate from surrounding images, fooling us.

My brother could Wichita wheelbarrow like I never could.

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

A car curved left, leapt the curb, and came at us like the line of a bullet.

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

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

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

Rebecca Lehmann