VINYL POETRY

Volume 4, October 2011

BIRDIE
Lillian Yvonne BertramView Contributor’s Note

Clinical Therapy

Dreaming again of an effortless

brother. He estranges me
with a plastic orange sword.

Pirates at play are we? Or
hawking through a forest. Step carefully, step

carefully
. A car

passes. Do we even think who our father
will teach to drive

first? Double dare, double

dare
. Never, no never. A cloud transforms
from shoe

& back again. All
that wasn’t allowed comes back again.

It’s the year I repeat
haircuts from the year

I wanted to be a boy.

No thought to what I could become:
cagey

bitch flicking photograph after photograph
with all the practice

of a trick punch. No stranger
to that feeling of bearing down

bearing down.