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Sébastien Bernard
Trying to read a book
Trying to read a book while you’re falling in love, desperately
Trying to read while your hair is being torn, or you are tearing it, or losing
it, or it is rising on its own
The way the monotonous crashing of the sea rises
Up to the monotonous filling-up of the moon—tumescent moon, were-
wolf hour, total eclipse of the marrow—
& at the marathon
Tell him to please cry in a ditch
About her
It’s both their faults or something, who cares?
God I’ve made mistakes
I’ll have answers tomorrow, I swear
For now
I’m just trying to read a goddamn book.
"He will leave you"
I am finished
The glass thrown against a brick wall
In this alley in reverse straightens in filmic
Grace into the flower that says: “he will leave you.”
Fish can't drown in water
That carny has exhausted itself
I’m standing at the window
No longer at the window
The image is discontinuous, the dune, the sea
I’ve lived variously
My veins have opened at certain tunes
And closed at certain faces, their maws
Lovers ate me and spat out certain parts back
That came wrapped in certain parts of themselves
The large intestine runs the world
I had to invent myself
My whole life is beautiful and threatening
It threatens me with itself
And sometimes the devil threatens my family
In my dreams
And I count to a hundred
All the hatred for mine to be
All the resentment
Consolation of the man who wishes
To continue writing like an adolescent
It must have been different then for each of us
We must have known different things
I didn’t want to paint a picture
I thought the words had destroyed each other
In my work
My country is nowhere really
Not here and not on a map
A book or a kiss
I am finished
Sébastien Bernard is a part-French Turkish poet and (non)fiction writer from—and currently based in—Istanbul. He was a Poets House Emerging Poets fellow, and a finalist for the 2019 Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest. His work appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, Prelude, DIAGRAM, SUSAN/The Journal, Black Warrior Review, KGB Bar Lit, Queen Mob's Teahouse, Madness Muse Press, and Nat.Brut (with a Pushcart and Best of the Net nomination, as well as a listing in Entropy’s “Favorite Poems Published Online”). He has called Brooklyn, Istanbul, Poughkeepsie, and Maputo home.