Five Poems by Derek Thomas Dew

 

Totality

 

Up from the river there’s a burnt out building

where narrow thieves have gathered around a fire,

and one of them has the story of how it all happened:

 

When a customer called and was put on hold,

the music that played only seemed to powder the silence

with the faint roof thump of a collapsing vein

 

and reflect the caller’s past as a captivity

painted in advertisement, a quest for bought totality 

without a single shadow to offer a single truth

  

and through its fibre, the music patterned the caller’s flesh

after itself—a creation that steals its time, a creation

that somehow no longer authors distance from the world.

 

 

Frozen Entrées

 

If a doorbell were to ring in the middle of an ocean

which touches a page that curls up entirely

too soon to be glimpsed by the gulls the night

has left behind then the shore will renew

as a place where everybody has a nickname

and nobody remembers why but that they need

away from awareness of the unharmed

and the harm they cause to the parted fleet

of ceramic mouths out to spit animals

high into the air at water’s request for the unity

of a tear’s plummet through cracked gods

that fondle the cold cheek of a dinner guest

inside of whom lies a cherry pit containing a black marble

inside of which breaths an ordinary family.

 

 

Drip Gas Fever

 

Once home,

I saw the theatres had changed

—bald nuns, fetid shag,

dead lamps.

 

Under the face of the woman

whose nose looked propped up

by toothpicks

 

all halls bore the colour

of avocado skin.

 

I found the camera mapped

in the lines drawn by the scatter of men

moving things around the set.

                  *

The man you’re killing

joins in with your prayer:

               

an author is untraceable,

the part of the bullet at rest.

 

 

Survivor Guilt

 

Everywhere I rest, there’s a boat.

There’s a boat caught

in a vein of elk

 

in a few feet of wet sand,

and we used to help it 

keep its secrets

 

even though we disliked it

and let it live and lived in it

and smelled it, and it was like an animal

that died in the mouth

of another animal

resembling a plant,

 

and anything

that came into us

was then a secret,

 

a cold to lie down in

and dissolve into.

And the tighter

 

I closed my eyes the bigger my secrets got.

May you collapse

gods simply

 

never

where I rest.

 

 

Striking, Strikeon

 

The small things that for no reason
live in the memory forever

offer an arrival apart,
a map without names

whose accidental folds and creases
become borders and paths

walked unknowingly
as if in pulse only,

while to forget is to walk
through a forest of hometowns   

while near a traffic loop striving
in the heart of downtown

stands the temple of an old god
next to a man selling phones

and a woman holding in her arms
a child she’s known only a day.

Derek Thomas Dew - I’m a neurodivergent, non-binary poet currently earning my poetry MFA. My debut poetry collection “Riddle Field” received the 2019 Test Site Poetry Prize from the Black Mountain Institute/University of Nevada. My poems have appeared in a number of anthologies, and have been published in a variety of journals, including Interim, Twyckenham Notes, The Maynard, The Curator, Two Hawks Quarterly, Tempered Runes Press, and Cathexis Northwest Press.