three poems

by Derek Dew

Blood/Tower Ratio

When memory is stuck 

and has no place to go

it becomes a glass shard

dropped in a clear green sea  

and is met on either side

by the story that is looking

clear through and seeing itself,

the same story that every one of us

vanishes from; am I now not

to see you in your wishes?

Not a one of us can hope

to pay for these doctors.

                            I have rinsed the paper towels for a second and third use.

                            I have tucked a cigarette behind a windshield wiper

                            for the ride down to the bar. Understand, the only labor

                           is to fill with possibility the void of the moment, 

                           so I’ll step backward through the flesh that contains me

                           in order to make space for another, and that space is the char

                           of a foreground remorseless as any beginning, a warmth

                           the occasion of whose faith makes us better than we are born.

                                                                                                               —The Mother

The Truth About Memory

You wake up and smile. The cave paintings.

Your smile grows until the sides of your mouth

begin to pinch your line of vision and corners kite

the flash boundaries that silver and skip before you.

Only the wind speaks. It says travel while it says no.  

It says your thumb is a root. Get rid of it, stupid.

The cave paintings blossom in the dark, have you seen

the street?  Birthdays everywhere, awful opal, all this.

All this in a cracked blacktop like a brow raging

at the same stroke of the sun every day.

One ritual, unchanging. Wake up and smile

and think about the cave paintings. Birthdays.

Wide open like ocean under each knuckle,

this weapon must be carried by each of us. 

                                     If we could have infected the newfound galaxy,

                                     we would have stood in utter desolation

                                     to glimpse all the way past it and into faith.

                                     But the day did not turn out that way.

                                     Discovery can only grow the old losses.

                                                                             —The Astronomer

There Once Was Trust 

In the choked central dunes of the desert,

a young water line, a row of luxury condos

—still new in their ancient bodies.

Still wrong for where they are. Gun metal

still a flash that never took root among flagging cacti

on jeweled creek’s bank. But by the time the condos reach us,

we’ll no longer pass for the people they were intended for.

By then, we will have taken the fight out of everyone else

—even the land itself, until there could no longer be any questions,

only the all-consuming answer so go.

And so, having perfected ourselves,

we will have absolutely nothing at all

to show for it.

                                 There’s a room but the beach slept through it.

                                 Big tables are set by new hands, like fires in a row.

                                                                                        —The Gambler

Photo of Derek Dew

BIO: Derek Thomas Dew is a neurodivergent, non-binary poet currently living in New York City. His 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, Allium, Two Hawks Quarterly, Ocean State Review, and Cathexis Northwest Press.