Hybrid Poetry by Erin M. Bertram
Finalist of the 2015 Talking Writing Prize for Hybrid Poetry
A Dream of Eros
In August, in New Orleans, in love, the heat is animal, the scent of magnolia hangs in the air the way smoke fills a crowded bar. If you’re quiet, you can hear the streetcar clacking the tracks all day, barges making their slow way downriver, the current easing east to west toward the Gulf. Only at night do you hear marauders moving through the dark, a little gathering wind. Even before landfall, the intimacy between us lay dog-tired on a frayed red rug. The almond cookies you baked despite the heat. The claw-foot tub. The small drum we kept in the kitchen to make the cockroaches disappear. The waves in my hair, suddenly, no longer there. All the sweat. And that giant orange “X” spray-painted on our glass front door. It was too late to go back to the way things were, too early to cut our losses & move camp in search of higher ground, repair the levee between us, clear the debris rushing in. So we stuck it out. Made do. We made it work in our tiny apartment until the pieces no longer fit. The silence hung heavy around us, on & off, for years. You were my best friend. There was nothing left for you to say but I love you, just not the way you need me to.
Living Alone
Just after midnight. A piece of cake waiting cool
& sweet for me in the fridge. The dull, steady hum
of rain outside my window. Hip-hop & Brahms
alternating on my speakers. Hat-head. The aftertaste
of lager. I haven’t been out of my apartment in three
days. The dishes done. The phone quiet. Everyone
I love, for the moment, warm & safe in their beds—
my partner, two states away, asleep on the opposite
side of the bed. I choose to sleep on a mattress on
the floor. I have two tattoos, five pairs of shoes, a
vibrator, a crown I need to get fixed, & a penchant
for stories that are not stories, not really. I know how
to pray & when to keep my mouth shut. How to make
soup, mend a hem, subsist on the sort of leanness
sustained attention demands. I know how to say I’m
sorry. And I know how not to live like it’s all I know
how to say. In one month, I’ll be thirty-three.
Tomorrow, I’ll wake early, hum songs I once knew
all the words to. Hunger. Heat lightning. My eyelids
sweating. The look of me holding my breath.
Art Information
- "Heat Lightning over New Orleans" © Kevin O'Mara; Creative Commons license.
Erin M. Bertram is the author of eleven chapbooks, including Memento Mori, published by Dancing Girl Press in 2014. An excerpt from her lyric hybrid text, “The Vanishing of Camille Claudel,” was a published finalist in the 2013 Diagram essay contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Handsome, Leveler, So to Speak Online, Copper Nickel, Uprooted: An Anthology on Gender and Illness, and elsewhere. She is a Ph.D. student and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
On the hybrid nature of these pieces, she says:
My prose poems and lyric hybrid texts are grounded in various climates of the body: the senses, intuition, eros, illness, memento mori. I'm interested in gray areas and exploring boundaries that are voiced and that remain unspoken but are still very real. How bodies and poems are both read and read into—and the desire to make sense of these dual/duel readings—directs my attention. I tend not to work with the line as a conceptual unit, but instead favor the sentence. I’m drawn to the sentence’s latitude of expression—its ability to contain asides and to exist in fragmented form—alongside its commonness, its accessibility. The sentence, then, helps me reflect everyday lived experience more accurately—both how things are and how I want them to be, respectively.
