Negative Money by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Author:Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2023-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

—temporarily full of the material limitations of time and space

The image of the fields as glass and Lillian as both missing and missed runs throughout the poem. Lillian addresses the fields as being made of glass (the concrete) and research (the abstract) in the title and first line and moves from an image of personifying the corn to one of domestic limitation where Lillian “squeezed & pulled one damp loaf down from the shelf after another” to the last line where another agricultural life awaits. Lillian develops the inherently colonialist image of manifest destiny and frontierism with the lines “Donning a white man’s mania all his own, Teddy Roosevelt believed in boar hunts and war-suckled men. He’d have something to say about this enterprising sunset, the shivering alfalfa, trim and sweet like champagne.” The simple image of open fields is rendered more complex (is always more complex, as no such field existed as “open” [for the cultivating] as Roosevelt would have had it.) The corn, by being “clad & thick on moans” is embodied. Lillian is seeking an impossible escape, not only by taking the roads through the fields imagining Lillian can leave male mania and colonization behind, but Lillian is naively trying to achieve an escape from history and time. This is not possible as “as long as the mile stayed a mile which it did.” Lillian cannot transcend, escape, or levitate away from it. The “wincing mammal” is an entrapping bubbling tar that lies within Lillian’s own body and reaches through other bodies, as well as being potentially geographically distant. Go a few lines further and “What they did not want to speak of, the men burned out there: pasture, polio rags, poplin junk, as long as there was a day to foul which was a long while.”

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