Derek Pollard

Derek Pollard is an English instructor at Lakewood Prep School in Howell, New Jersey, an associate editor at New Issues Poetry & Prose (Western Michigan University), and a contributing editor at Barrow Street. As for recent publications, he has poems and reviews appearing or forthcoming in Ambit (UK), Caketrain, Colorado Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Diagram, Hawai’i Review, iota (UK), Pleiades, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Shade, and Zone 3.

A Day Busy With Indecision

The comb, the toothpaste, the hand
Mirror, all in dim, watery light

This is our life together

Cigar smoke, blue as the bicycles
We rode through Tucson
Heavy as the sangria Gregor made

Today the raspberries are little
Brown pods waiting for rain
And the rain streaks the sky
To the east like hammered tin

It is cold in this place, and my jeans
Chaff the skin of my thighs

The fruit is a dream we hold to
Small, and new, and alive to us

The rain moves over Kalamazoo
Startlingly warm, bringing
With it a pair of robins that dart
Between the oaks and the sudden
Greenness

This is our life together
Quiet, and aimless, and full