What is Ours
Out of faded afterthought in its spreading yard of white flame
a line of dark that splits the light moves in several directions at once
and before long has left a skyline of hands raised for shade
to better receive the sight of land despite the only definition
being a debt none of us can afford, though our purpose is the image,
to live in it, to know its glow, know the floor of eternity as the back of the mind
which is the image’s way of ending, of achieving stillness, and further
into the image, sleeves are rendered over the bulk of bare wrists, and we,
we become aware it is us seeing it all, that our silence is always our purpose,
is always to see and refuse what is ours, unable to afford what we’re looking at.
If they are present, the warmth is theirs, so I am still agitated,
wounded even by sleep. Carts of fruit have broken in the street.
Everything cannot form neat little lines; some things must splatter to happen.
The recurring aprons have failed their pledge. The self-checkout is gathering cobwebs.
The menus are blowing away in the wind. A couch in the street is the crested horizon.
But I am still here, shoes and everything, and I am absolutely wasting all of my joke.
I find my truth in what I don’t agree with, and from my seat on the airplane
I hear the flight attendant announce the only missing passenger, and it’s me.
—The Banker
To Come
We thought we might shut the anthem up good,
so we drank, watched unspeakable joy capsize,
touched burgundy night, were outraged with ourselves
in the morning, and realized our inexpressiveness
was our only morality, the anthem. It came from
the heart of inconsequence, only to be glimpsed while forgetting.
It came from a place of purity, purity that rang like escape routes
from an implacable faith, where scouting was a shout at water
lathered in streaks of ash. The anthem came from a place
people weren’t sure really existed, yet had memories of,
memories that announced themselves like collective hallucinations
in rehearsal of childhoods to come, but in the end, the anthem
turned out to be nothing more than the stale air
shut away in a room that was locked from the outside.
All the many thin, angled bars of light
slowly floated dust down the old beer signs.
The jukebox again repeated the good song
which spoke clearly in the only voice.
The bad song does not speak in the only voice.
—The Drinker
Cop
Soon it will be dark, and in her lack of sight
her ear will supply all the courtyard birdsong
of trickling water in a cold office bathroom.
There will be an elevator shaft, and in the silent elevator,
her ear will supply the sound of a dog walking in circles.
Outside on a park bench will sit a little harmonica
and passersby will invent a child blowing into it.
When we think of the past, our efforts seem silly.
It’s often difficult to decide on a monument
when every single sleep that comes answering is bare.
A god is vice begins and ends vice
—The Thief
The One in Charge
One day the ice in his glass
did not melt properly
and he discovered he was empty.
But when no one can afford
to relax at the top, how to tell
what relaxing looks like?
We kidded ourselves; we spoke of tar and rain,
balconies and raw meat, sun on umbrellas.
But what we desired most could only suffice
if too much to receive, a place only visible
from the outside, so we looked all over
not for what we had lost, but for the moments we lost it;
we looked for the beautiful ways, the ambitious ways which
in the past, with far more people to know, we lost it all.
—The Second Gunman
Coin into Fountain
Like any precise enough metallic
put to milliseconds across a dome of daylight,
it wasn’t itself as it was happening,
as it was happening, it was something else,
it was a flickering jewel between towers
in shaky blue sky above city traffic,
then the slap of the surface, water closing fast
the circle by mimicry of shape and rushing
across the engraved profile toward itself
until a clash spiraling finger oil upward
to dissolve under the surface and its dialogue
which was then the intact hum of the buried above
while the bottom was struck and all the other coins
already installed long enough to bear small life
fell storied into their own respective borders,
and the dialogue above the surface continues;
who is there left to abandon?
They learn when they buy.
—The Billionaire
Derek Thomas Dew (he/she/they) is a neurodivergent, non-binary poet currently living and teaching in New York City. Derek’s debut poetry collection “Riddle Field” received the 2019 Test Site Poetry Prize from the Black Mountain Institute/University of Nevada. Derek’s poems have appeared in a number of anthologies, and have been published widely, including Interim, ONE ART, Allium, The Maynard, Azarão Lit Journal, Two Hawks Quarterly, Ocean State Review, and Overgrowth Press.
