The Smoke in the Street

Our silence
is not true silence,

it is a scream
drowned en route

to its target,
lost to white gravel

under flakes
of dried blood.

Our disbelief
was given to us

by those who made us,
same as it was given

to them by whoever
came before, and just like

disbelief did for them,
it has quietly become

the lasting stillness
in which we will spend

the rest of our lives
looking to return belief

to a living silence
like smoke to an empty street.

*

Young Body Author

At the cinderblock wall outside the bar
yelling for his ma to get up,
does the boy invent himself and regret it?

Will he wish to flee flesh’s refuge
into disentangled & shrinking hand, reverse to
collapse hand inward as negotiable form

able to tilt its own genesis this way or that until
the just body rises to pattern and sinew?
He will have to walk home after the cops come.

He will have to decide if he is only this way
because he is in this place, somehow the only
place that ran between his baseball cap

& his jeans standing at the cinderblock wall
outside the bar.

*

Derek Thomas Dew (he/she/they) is currently living in NYC. 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.