AJ BERGMANN
- Jun 9
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 12
AJ Bergmann is a 2026 Subnivean Poetry Award finalist. They are a writer, educator, and scientist from the San Francisco Bay Area. They hold an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. AJ's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Madison Review, Denver Quarterly, and other publications.
PRINCESS CAKE
The day before Valentine’s I wear calluses into my heels wearing combat boots to the mundane extreme of walking in the city in which I work but do not live but where I thus do forty hours of my living each week. I decide I need a reward for this living. In this accounting living is not its own reward but work but certainly not a given. God no and not god given. I come to the abrupt incline after leaving the bakery inundated by halves of partnerships seeking signifiers to gift their other significant others. I have no significant other and so my slice is for me. I take the hill. I take everyone here including past lovers but not as past lovers. Only when they were lovers in the past. Once I stood for a photo with my face against another face with the bridge as background and I couldn’t stand the look of it being us so there is no evidence I was here with her. So far as I know there is no evidence of her in this city and so reminiscing is relegated to association and abstraction. She refused to kill ants or leave tips. She was named for a virtue she lacked. Let us call her Mercy. I take to the steps unmercifully. I do not wear my clothes well but leave my clothes well-worn which is a testament to friction and endurance. I leave any other testament to friction and endurance to Mercy. I think I hear an unfound species in the ceanothus but the spirit of discovery escapes me so the newness remains abstraction like newness is to me. To make the difference real I must make more of living than sweetness I already know. Though I enjoy marzipan and jam. Though I enjoy green fondant and buttercream flowers. My first date on Valentine’s day was last Valentine’s day so I made a bouquet and took it on the bus and gave it to a woman and she looked at me unmercifully and that’s the last time I tried living like it could be anything new.
HOW I BECAME A GORGE
It starts with a show and what a show it is: sneaker toe snagged on the pebbled slope so I can come to blows with a birch before my debauched descent through the briar—tearing my tee and scratching my breast—down to an open-mouthed kiss to the gravel such that I embed minerals in my smile. Crunch collapse complete. Opening starts with breaking and man can I break: dry skin split on eyelid lips chin chest and hands. Earth demands a way in and what do I do but provide. Each thorn a key (no lock of me remains (even my hair tends ivy)). At my lowest no human reassures me I am human so I assume otherwise. Here runs water enough to baptize me chasmic. Here my pit of past finds purpose––form fitting function––cleaving (((cell from cell) self from self) health from help). In my missing on the fossil bed I go Devonian: a great coral reef without a sea to get stoned in. Process speeds beyond belief. Down my center I separate. My nervous system recedes to landscape by cycle sediment abrasion scour slide. When I tell you to make my shape my shape what I’m telling you is––River––wear me down.
“Suddenly you just understand”
-Lynda Barry, “I’m not sure how to look at art,” posted on Tumblr in May 2016
Is it childish
how I always want
to hold your hand?
So I’m childish. Lead
me through the gallery
where you want,
how you want.
I suspect that I
am broken in
a completely common way
where I can’t tell
what’s there in front
of me. But you
read up. You found
a story. Sorry
for staring. You tilt your head.
I match your move,
parallel chess
pieces unopposed.
What’s this square?
Why this shade?
Before the leafed gold
faith figures, I feign
confusion and you
miss the joke
and make me learn.
About brush and pigment,
yes, but also how
words are honey
when you care.
How I can mimic
my way closer
to wonder without
words. I follow
your finger. I say,
“Oh, I see.”
And then I do.
A VOICE*
Loneliness’s distillation:
the shipless Pacific kissing
a sky absent any plane’s
scintillation. Letters swim
because no other locomotion makes
a lick of sense. Pitched deep
in flooded circumstance,
what disbelief can I suspend?
Only a storm-lashed sailor
with a gash across my face.
Total conditions––concussion especially––
displaced the gearshift that puts
my self-preservation in drive.
Stuck in neutral, distress beacon
broken, I ask aloud, at a loss,
at a crossing, can any good come
from desperate calculations under
disinterested constellations.
And a voice outside, inside, everywhere
answers a clear yes.
* Inspired by Tami Oldham Ashcraft’s survival story, Red Sky in Mourning
WE’RE NOT THAT BAD, ARE WE?
a daughter asks a mother,
looking at an emissions map.
The dumpster says SUN
in shaky yellow letters.
Readers voted by phone
to kill the new Robin.
No one gets to know
where the tallest tree is.
The elk stock-still in the street
is indifferent to headlights.
A bystander sprints
to the Narcan vending machine.
There is a will to see more
than what is above.
This will is thin, like
a miracle. There are just
enough molecules to hold
a rainbow. This will is slight,
like it will break
like it’s a promise.