Derek Thomas Dew
The Landlord
If only he would map
the paths of human fingers,
he would see the sun
soar above the barbwire
like wedding photography.
We were needing to abandon this hesitant
style of breath fraught with how else we might’ve endured.
And we realized what we were looking for was not a pricey loft
in the city, an old farmhouse in the country or all the buses and airlines
lost in between. When exposed, skin learns the day. What holds us is a
landscape of empty furniture so we can avoid knowing anything more.
—The Tenant
Completion
Had we actually lived our past
instead of awakening to its memory,
our itineraries would be up-to-date,
they would include our autobiographies,
and the sandy promenade before us
would be calling the afternoon into all things.
But as it happened, others who stood in for us
lived our past, others who we unknowingly took
our names from, and the sandy promenade
is burning into a grass shore whose green
kicks us up into clouds which drizzle down
on the dancing people atop the hill who are guided
by the principal that beauty is not
to be understood, or it, too, would be,
like everything else in the world,
lost to completion.
It is the day when a crowd is needed to describe an animal which doesn’t exist
and I am at war with myself over a form of marketable pride. I like to think the last time I knew the truth, I didn’t fear the carnage of my own masterstroke. But now the choir of sirens in the street is cries of an animal being willed to life. The prize is glass to keep back the wind and rain, and we all know the rule: insult the king, meet the cold. When I first got here, I bought a slice of pizza from several paid officials, all of whom smiled. It has become apparent that more than one will come to know me when I am complete.
—The Assassin
What’s Natural
It’s here again: in the name of industry
each child steps forth to choose a trellis
and paint a predestined nowhere, such is the righteous life,
but every nowhere is a sight can’t be held in paint like a sky
in the heart left after a dream, this is the apprenticeship
to the real woods:
in every game there’s two games being played,
one of belief and one of profit, if any
of the children approach, don’t shake hands.
Later, in the city, someone lights up the empty diner.
Any recanting is totally natural.
When I found my way into the light, first, I felt the heat
from the pavement, then I noticed them. They seemed to weave
between each other, to dilate and tighten independently,
but close together, like the fibers of a muscle free of thought,
each a degree of impulse, slipping into and out of buildings and cars.
And then it was I heard them yelling at each other.
The tone and language cast the sounds as insults.
I could distinguish the words, not the way
the words were being combined, but obviously
it had them engaging each other with a weapon
I was unable to grasp, so acted like I knew.
I stood there in the street surrounded by them all.
And this is how I have managed to stay in this place:
by being ever ready to believe that I do not understand.
—The Child
To the Creditors
Morning is the time
we meet ourselves inexactly
in betrayal of an exact sky
when only silence names the light,
when only shadow can echo the wailing.
Us all in our disintegrating
add up to destination
in all light brought to chance
except the blind fury of choice
reinstated like a tree.
Every morning down the street in a war
there are construction workers
admiring a poodle.
Morning
is when the movie’s end credits roll.
All the service vans in the street.
Roofing, glass, heating and plumbing.
One might find on paper each lifespan
of late but halt only to consider one kind.
Last-chance sandwiches don’t know:
the people fear the price of their medicine.
—The Doctor
To the Debtors
There’s an ocean kept apart from itself
scattered into splashes behind sounds
of traffic lights, sounds of fists,
of nowhere to stand, of shoulder blades
hanging in laundry rooms, hanging
where our books say the prayers went.
Prayers to nothing, prayers merely the voice
knowing us out of ourselves rewording food
for our conscious bellies; there’s a splash of ocean
behind the sound of tree bark, splashes behind the sounds
of forearms and spines, the only sound not hiding
some drop of ocean is that of our words which continue to fall
until new words, not our own, land upon them, and we call that place.
Wait a second, how to tell what is agony
and what is motion when just getting mad
no longer helps the world? What is it that one sleeps?
We have heroes in steakhouses. Will that which we are sleeping
always be the past?
—The Therapist
Bruxism
The first few murders held our attention, but when they became a daily spectacle
we couldn’t divide our efforts between them and our search for a livable wage,
and from the pigeons that dress the awning we gathered that we were unprepared for even the few tiny days we were given; we’re exhausted by the brevity of our time here, and the faded bargains written in the windows claim our sleep offers us no restoration, the tops of the tents in the alley have dried out in the summer sun and crackle softly in the breeze; we’re too weak to wrestle a pattern out of our days, yet for us forever is a reductive agent, slimming in a sleeved wrist. Despite the lingering oil where a car had been, we admit to ourselves we’re unprepared for what there is to possess, we’re not even sure how we got to this point in our lives, but it’s apparent there is a habit that solves; a part of each of us feels like the proper tools might be identified if we keep facing the days, and despite the murders, there is now a growing meltwater, an
ever-deepening breath where the dim’s hypnotic touch had been.
Expected
It never becomes clear what the ruins are supposed to mean,
and it would appear that revision is the only place to call home,
yet among the torn posters, rusted doorknobs and draping pigeons
there is a sense that what once was has no idea how to know us,
that having reached its end, the rubble left behind has tailored upright
its own beginning into a dusky enclosure without us, and we are strangers
to our own direction of travel. Even the shapes of our voices blur
in a falling away from our ears which cannot hear them birthing,
cannot recognize them as they winnow through the red sagging roofs
and tilting brick walls that shout the thorn when it appears
on the horizon as a single pillar of light, not traveling but widening,
whose reaches warm perfume out the soil and charm the hornets
off the curb, and within that moment of knowing, within the depths
of that glow that eases through midnight, lies all that is expected of us.
Derek Thomas Dew is a neurodivergent, non-binary poet currently living 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 in a variety of journals, including Interim, ONE ART, The Maynard, Ultramarine Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Twyckenham Notes, Ocean State Review, and Cathexis Northwest Press.
Featured Art:
Untitled or “key of knowledge”, Guy “Dcypher” Ellis and DTR Crew, 2021
