What Illness

Women are islands. Men are peninsulas.
Yes, alphabetically, the penis helps you

find the shore. Land ho! Gather green bananas.
He was an oxymoron. And an ox. And oxygen.

Talk, Talk, Talk, Talk, Talk.
Argue to the moon and back.

Develop one spine of steel. Never deviate from script.
You are one hundred miles away. All post-Hiroshima.

You are the trainer. You toss cute dead casualties
into the waiting mouths of smarter beasts on cue.

We are not the medium at all. We are not the act.
We are the food. We are invisible parts of tricks.

Poor creatures. We breathe out carbon dioxide. We kill
trees. We think, despite it all, our output to be essential.

There is too much fiction here. Love, that daily soul-to-
soul phone called commute made on couches over cock

Tails. Romance that drum in your swimsuit region, doll.
The size of a hello inside a farewell, all strings attached.

We vacate. We will take some voluminous vacations from
our first person. Our minds strut in bikinis in inner beauty.

We are four-leafed with thumbs besides. Be a snow globe.
Shake yourself into dire circumstance for no reason at all.





Emily Grace Bernard lives in Northfield, MN. Her poems have been published in the Adroit Journal, Wilderness House Literary Review, the Brewery Journal, and Whistling Shade.