Derek Berry

still life with diving duck & roadkill

​the river’s whiskey & my body
a raft i have built from detritus.
i burned a city to build a compass
that points only to a deer’s body
splayed roadside, organs exposed.
 
once, i carved an entire forest
into a canoe just to wreck
among the rapids. once, i
swirled the deer’s blood
into a mural on asphalt.
no, not a mural. just splatter.
I am always trying
to make death
into something gorgeous.
 
Instead, i chain a cement block to my ankle,
sink into the river-bottom muck.
lungs filter silt & burn.
i disown
willow bark each time i sing
into the current’s neck.
even the moss knows my name
is not memorable.
 
like a wake of buzzards dipping beaks
into the carcass, tearing pink kinks
of entrails from the gut,
i subsist an entire summer vacuuming
the cream filling from moonpies.
 
i am vulture-drunk
on grief.
once, a corpse i called friend
became a poem, & i woke
with a gun that fit perfectly
in my mouth. once, i drank
too much gin, then plucked an elegy
from between my teeth.
 
the body
decomposing
is too slow
a rapture. 

---

i know about joy

​tonight even after the sun slacks off, sinks
into the hammock-horizon       i grasp                        lightning bugs in the mesh of fingers                          hold close
whatever passes for illumination                     here.
 
tonight i am lit-wicked roman candle
alighting the backyard                         in a wreath of ruin.
become barrage                       of abandon: each ecstatic                     whizz
smears                         even the dark into kaleidoscope.
call this coronation                              call this halo of fluorescent joy
a crown                                               you wear only until morning
 
tonight                                                 we have occupied the house in the woods for five days,
a friend’s family vacationing in florida            & their home become palace of debauchery:
 
a record catches fire
when it plays the right song                                                    the hallway floods
with toilet water                                   the porch becomes dumping ground
for booze-drowsy bodies                                our bodies vessel the impulse
                          to rage.
in revelry         we confuse plastic pouches of white powder with     joy, half-full
bottles with                              joy.
 
tonight             even what i write about joy
                        becomes eventually elegy,
grasping for what cannot be                                                                                                    held.
                                   
tonight--
 a vinyl forty-five,
its grooves embedded                          with match-strike paper.
the record immolates               when the needle drops & only music
escapes, only a song                            whose words blur.
 
tonight becomes         a husk of glitter—this                                                                                      what we know of joy,
a substance we must slip into our bodies                    so that we might slip outside               our bodies.
what we know of joy is we do not know
how to survive when it is gone. 

--
Derek Berry is the author of Heathens & Liars of Lickskillet County (PRA, 2016). They are the founder of The Unspoken Word, a Carolina-based literary non-profit providing free literary resources to authors and readers. Their recent work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Yemassee, Gigantic Sequins, BOAAT, Taco Bell Quarterly, & elsewhere.