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.