BERM

But the roost is missing.
Therefore explanation is needed.
A berm forms where given.
Therefore deformation precedes it.
The roost is given a body.
The roost is a history of failed explanations.
But its proportions rarely shed all recognition.
Proportions still form around its perfect lean.
Proportions are factored into this lean.
Proportions are not marks.
Marks are formed through force.
They form force.

It’s hard to and not to.
Because tendencies have common ancestors.
There is always a handful or always a suffocating throng.
Because you can make a pile out of anything.
A pile of one thing tends to impede the movement of an unpiled thing, or another pile of things.
A thing with a raised cleft can cause things in a state of aeration to clump.
Attention sometimes splits in this way.
What is essentially distinctive is how the depth and dimension of a rendering is not given in the
same way its alongsidenesses.
Piling just tends to happen.
We still have our quarry.
The descendants we produce, had in common, still.
Two or more descents with nothing shared, resultant in the same kind of prey.

It’s not like the shame of sharing a room or pleasure is modern.
It’s pretty much over anyway.
A place with a view is still preferable to a place without.
You can stop denying it.
You can still ask if the view is nice.
You can cup your hands to the ground and sweep them repeatedly in the same direction with a
non-negligible degree of downward pressure before stopping at the same point in order to
make a slope or a vantage from which the vision of things can get nicer.
Some grounds take longer to form than others.
From higher up you can better watch over the crops.
You can slough off stabbings while making a statement.
And you can live on pudding.
One can.

The thinnest passage, only ever hair thin.
The longest, no longer than all the world’s passages combined.
The last passage, which cannot be withdrawn, and for that reason bores us.
Someone safer than me pointed all this out.

Developmental outcomes for infants improve when familiar pursuits take place within unfamiliar
environments or when familiar environments are the setting for unfamiliar pursuits.
Difficulty and failure can be eased with a comforting smile.
Not everyone wants to learn to swim.
Not everyone lives near a body of water.
Not everyone is visible in the waves.
Or can open their eyes while submerged.
Style is only one of the many things to come.

A berm is a raised strip of ground that runs along the side of a road or a body of water.
You might stand on a one by a lake with your fishing pole as you bait your hook, and not even
know it.
A berm is any stretch of grass or land that forms a kind of shelf above or along a river, train
tracks, or highway.
Some are a natural feature of the landscape, while others are man-made.
A berm can form a barrier between two spaces, and when the word is used in a military context it
means a defensive barrier.
An example of a berm would be not the trenches along a front, but the visible parts of those
trenches, seen from ground level.
What they lack is any kind of hidden cavity.
(Even if, as in the example above, they result from and are the sign of a hidden cavity.)
Berms are also used as a method of environmental spill containment and spill control, and can be
constructed as an impermeable barrier around and beneath a storage or processing plant,
when erected sufficiently enough in advance to contain the entire plant’s volume in the
event of rupture; this is often achieved on large sites by surrounding a large plant with
multiple large berms.
On broad beaches there may be three or more naturally formed subparallel berms, resultant from
the interaction of different wave conditions.
On narrow beaches a berm several metres wide may be laid down each summer and destroyed
each winter by storm waves.

As a person you function like a foyer or mudroom.
It’s like being buried alive, except you’re dead.
Entombed in the same ringing welcome given to your enemies.
You don’t say anything, but sometimes there’s a hiccup, a blip, a slight wobble, the bounce
bequeathed to you by the speedbump that regulates any given instance of understanding,
and then what happens is an erasure of what had been a smooth transit from not getting it
to getting it – not just an erasure of memory, but a real erasure of the space that transit
had encompassed – as soon as what was possible is recognized as the dead horizon one
was travelling to.
These kids are not proof of anything.
These kids are not anything.
I am, as they say, on foot, and I may not even be involved.
No summum bonum; merely, in each rout, discontinuous increase.

Though a friend remains concerned.
I’ve tried to calm them down, but nothing works.
It takes two hours for me to travel to their apartment from mine – I have to take two different
metro lines and an unreliable bus to get there.
When I visit, they’re anything but relaxed.
They almost never leave their room.
It’s like they’re agitated, but at the same time dispassionate.
I know their dispassion has nothing to do with me.
Because they’re not sick.
They’re not angry.
They’re not poor.
They’re just not doing too well.
They’re just going through a hard time.
They’re not doing well in a way that’s indelibly particular to them.
The hardship they’re experiencing is the outer expression of the inner acquisition of inviolable
self-knowledge, and this must always be remembered.
They’re not disintegrating, they’re simply moving things around.
They’re not emending a problem, they’re taking ownership of it.
They’re a perfect representative of something I almost understand.
For example, that their room is much larger than mine.
That my home is a bit bigger than theirs.
That their view is much nicer than mine.
That my vision is a little better than theirs.

That insistence is a mannerism which styles and defers fate.

That insistence is a mannerism which defers and styles fate.

Nora Fulton lives in Montréal, Québec. She is the author of four collections of poems, most recently 2025's Cuckoo's Low Reel, from Hiding Press. Her poetry has been published in the Paris Review, Bernadette Magazine, the Chicago Review, Trilobite, the Tiny, Social Text, and elsewhere. Her critical writing has appeared in the Poetry Project Newsletter, O Bod, Music and Literature, among other publications.