Sunday, July 30, 2023 “Negative Money” by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
my town went singing
to seeds. Those who stayed
could barely
make a Sunday choir.
Not enough juice
in the county to plump up
the memory of water,
or a single itinerant tomato.
I made the same poisoned meal.
Days like two midnights in a jar
and it takes twice as much money
to live the way a cactus
lives on air. My men took
to cards & drink as punishment
for stricken soil. The dust blew
so bad and like anyone
I made a list of names I wouldn’t mind
dressing in a child of my own.
We paid a charlatan to shoot rain
out of the clouds but the dynamite
tied to kites proved more useless
than mud. Like any good charlatan,
he never returned. Enough pale misery.
Now we are poor in every corner
of the word. Not a pot
to piss in, or the skin of a fig to suck on.
About the Poet
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an African American writer, poet, artist, and educator originally from Buffalo, New York who works at the intersection of computation, AI, race, and gender.
They are the author of “Travesty Generator” (Noemi Press), a book of computational poetry that received the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work and was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. They are the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Their other poetry books include “How Narrow My Escapes” (DIAGRAM/New Michigan), “Personal Science” (Tupelo Press),” a slice from the cake made of air” (Red Hen Press), and “But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise” (Red Hen Press).
This poem appears as the title poem of their recently published fifth book “Negative Money” available now from Soft Skull Press. Bertram is the Director of the annual Chautauqua Writers’ Festival, and this fall will join the faculty of The University of Maryland-College Park as Associate Professor of English and Director of its MFA Program in Creative Writing.