Three Poems by Derek Thomas Dew

The Promise of Variety

This is the hour when nothing makes us happy.
Some of us are weightless, some of us are struggling
with forms of debt, some are sure that they’ll crumple
into a ball on the ground if they leave the restaurant
and face the day, others are in the alley collecting cans.
Everyone seems to be going about in their own way,
but there’s a pebble in every shoe, a clanging tension
the neck shares with the hands, a sense of missing the mark,
a feeling that the white plastic patio chair would shatter
if one of us tried to sit down in it, but that the shattering
would reveal nothing to us, except maybe that the promise
of variety was a lie. Is this really part of a day? Any day?
This is the hour when the prospect of rescue sets us
against each other, as there’s always been an unachievable balance,
a symmetry we can’t join, some ideal born when we close our eyes
and listen patiently for the whisper that never finds us,
the one which we would have no idea
how to answer anyway.

*

Paid For

One day the idea of ourselves came through the faded gold
pollen dotting the pines, through the empty french fry boxes
and crumpled up burger wrappers on the floor of the parked cars,
it came over the tar shingled roofs and into the barrel fires
at the bicycle chop shop deep down the alley, and finally, it hit us.
We could no longer remain in our story, in its victorious coming from
and going to emptiness, so now in its wake we have a cheek resting
against a hand, sun on the face, and we try to make it work, make it enough,
but instead of what might have been—enough to pay rent, enough
for a bus pass—we have the idea of ourselves, which only seems
to suggest that endurance is a haunting, one without sensation;
we’re prompted to search for a building in the center of the buildings
which look so close to rotting they’ve become a miracle of presence,
indivisible in mood and resolve, and we try to model our faces
that way in the windows, now in a twitch in vain, scared, tired,
and we stare at the outside, sit and stare, as though everything,
everything out there were already bought and paid for.

*

The Seven-Year-Old

Nobody else was there
Dark under summer palm
Streetlight slanting in
The window spread me
Far across the room
Sirens in the distance
My hands began to slip
Down along the curtains
Just to part the yellow
Then to prop it open
With an old ashtray
So I could see the street
Denying the wind
I wandered to the room
Where a cardboard dresser
Shouldered a small tv
Faux-wood & thick glass
With a twist of the knob
Shocked into high bronze
Twitched up channel ninety
The screen just mixed colors
But the moans came through
Just fine they overlapped
Bright then split again
I stopped on that channel
& I knew that sound
How it retreated fast
Into itself from the walls
But had I seen the image
Assembled on the screen
Seen who was doing what
I would have known
What had happened to me
I would have guessed
My place in the picture
I am the one enacting
My own definition
Halfway to becoming
Everybody else

*

Derek Thomas Dew (he/she/they) is a neurodivergent, non-binary poet currently earning an MFA in poetry. 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, Twyckenham Notes, The Maynard, The Curator, Two Hawks Quarterly, Ocean State Review, and Cathexis Northwest Press.