Because this is a still a poem with an animal in it and I am still trying—I might say “it offers youits meaty heart, with no lasting conditions.”If you’ve seen a struck deer thrash its life out on the shoulder, a burner that clickswithout flaming, you know how they seize to death.Who cares what I think, but I wished just then to have a knife. I wished I knew a little about gunsand to own one or to know something sorcerous.Because nothing but blood tastes like blood, I’ve cut myself for its coppery flavor. Only God knowsI’m good. My mother says I’ve no scruples, the wayI make no claims to being a permanent person, how my move from husband to ex-husband came ona wave of expediency and self-promotion. If you’ve goneto the store and left behind a life—the kind that comes with seating, spare change jars, someone’s green thumb—then you know how I angered at the womanshrieking behind the wheel of her cracked Escape, phone to face, doe spasming on the shoulder.Someone should knuckle up and kill this deer. A roadwayin America and there’s no policeman on hand to squash a neck? It’s early evening & the sky’s poeticallyblameless gray fills your throat with the thick despairso familiar to the heavily indebted. Mountaineers know you can’t save anyone on good will, that high altitudeis minus morality. So, Confessionalism. Or,Two Truths and a Lie: I married a man I met on an airplane. I killed that deer. I have no patiencefor even the most cherubic of children.
Facts About Deer
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- August 30, 2023
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“Facts About Deer” from NEGATIVE MONEY: by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram.
Published by Soft Skull Press on June 27, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Adrianne Mathiowetz
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is creative writer, computational poet, artist, and educator who currently directs the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland. Their poetry collections include Travesty Generator (Noemi Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Noemi Press Poetry Prize, finalist for the National Poetry Series, and longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award; How Narrow My Escapes (Diagram/New Michigan 2019), Personal Science (Tupelo Press, 2017); a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press 2016); and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press, 2012). Bertram holds a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the creative writing program at the University of Utah, among degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their poetry, prose, and essays have been published in various journals, and they are the recipient of numerous honors. Their fifth book, Negative Money, was published in June 2023.
"These poems incisively render the ugly contours of the worst political and cultural parts of America and the world, but also hold hope and imagination for a future not bound by them."
—Sarah Neilson, The Seattle Times
"Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s sixth collection of poetry, Negative Money, shows a poet with technical skill who engages in playfulness with form. This excellence of craft delivers some seriously on-point poems in the book that explore money, the whiteness of capitalism, and the day-to-day living in a place that is conditional on exploitation and extraction . . . A collection that certainly feels timely while taking the reader to small or internal spaces or zooming out in scope, offering something that is both profound and reflective."
—Sarah Neilson, Shondaland
"Like the economic system it so searingly indicts, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s fifth full-length collection, Negative Money, structures itself around contradiction—between the creative and catastrophic energies of American capitalism, between the promise and peril of courting such energies, between one’s past and present selves, in all their inherent inconsistency . . . Unflinching in its intersectional critique, agile in its thinking, and possessed throughout of a formal range that never feels gimmicky, Negative Money straddles that existential contradiction of relying—for some mean measure of sustenance—on the very systems which continuously imperil one."
—Preposition
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