A Daily Glance
Erica Bernheim’s
Between the Room and the City is a spunky but dark chapbook. To be honest, when I first looked at it, I opened it to the second page and started reading and then realized that I was reading the table of contents. The first few titles are “Dear Baby, Love Here is Cornfed/To and from the Man on the Beach with the Penis in His Hand/Summer Crookneck.” Parataxis, I thought, but then I realized what I had, and the book does not work on parataxis. The speaker throws language at a you, not necessarily the reader, but at someone specific, and the language is chiding at times:
I’m willing to bet that greasy twenty
stuck to the bottom of your empty
file cabinet, it’s never me you think of
when you try to shoot yourself
onto the ceilings of your apartment.
At the same time that the speaker is chiding, there’s a hint of longing or of being left in a way that was not wanted. There’s an interesting conversation going on between the speaker and someone, and it feels like we’re overhearing it. With Fyre’s definition, that makes it classically lyric.
Comments