The Erasing
In the dark courtyard we sat and discussed the recovery.
The recovery of what, we didn’t know, but it could’ve been
a street scene only remembered for its center curves, detached
angles sketched in downtown lights, or the swimming corners
of some dimly lit restaurant seen when we were only witnesses
for life’s planet to pass through. Whatever it was, we discussed if it might
had been from even earlier, from a time before colors could be bordered
into shapes, when our own awareness was mostly temperature, when we
were our own periphery, motionless in flight, soothed by a sense that nothing
was waiting for us. One of us remarked that we could be searching for the emotion
of rolling down a hill in a car, breath decentered, into a shadow that fades
as it approaches, revealing the sight of a mountain range more like a wave
in its authority, or the sight of fog over a valley viewed through a window,
and someone else confirmed yes that’s it: the very first wild, experienced
via incomprehension, not happiness exactly, but a better glint in the dark
outside of time, where the eye keeps nothing, where skin is passed through,
where the stream is the whole body, erasing as it pours.
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Derek Thomas Dew currently lives 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, Twyckenham Notes, The Maynard, Ultramarine Lit Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Ocean State Review, and Cathexis Northwest Press.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 