DEREK MONG / 3 POEMS
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THE REALITY TELEVISION STAR
My days are lit like Emmy statuettes.
I only glow because I’m envied so.
Were you taught that screens fossilized one’s thoughts—
as if in amber a word (once heard) was sealed?
Do you think me mutable— like cable news?
I am duller than I let on.
I improvise a life to lift your own,
using my time with him or her—my so-called fellow stars—
to nest inside your ear.
The ouroboros of self-regard, I view myself everywhere.
Watch me watch you
from posters over subway cars.
You check your cell phone’s bars. We are equals—or so the network feels—
in our need for love
and listeners.
Does acting help you meet friends who seem free?
Do you go home as bored as me?
I aspired to pyrrhic fire
but found myself—
swipe right, swipe left—persisting under fingertips.
I’ve learned the joys of direct address:
I am yours.
I can still be hers or his.
In this I mimic public speakers (pols, preachers)
recharged by the enfilade of flashbulbs.
I am smaller than I once appeared
but return, tiresome as spring. One day you’ll vote me your new king.
THE CLOUD
I am the expanse
of bodies
Can you feel the dust
Hear the whir of my
I’ve held your kids
because someone
I am here
after rain, bright
Moons wane, trucks
but look: you rise
One day they’ll find you
in which everyone
that never share
tingle in a room
viscid zeros and ones?
in photos, emails,
sold you a tale:
to make your past clear
as the touchscreen
brake, pop music
through the flue
beneath keystrokes
meets, repository
air on the street.
you’re left in alone?
I am a tomb.
and vids—all this
the cloud never fails.
as a pasture
concealing your pain.
still sounds fake—
of my uploads.
of new fallen snow.
FOR THE LAST HUMAN
Once you knew others, at least a mother.
How does ego change when the other Is are all smothered?
Selfishness precedes you into extinction,
though it’s selfishness that led you like a guide dog
toward this unholy distinction.
You’re easy to conjure in times of despair
and easier to envy—you’re free to not care.
We see you sway gently in a cobweb of words;
our old borders dissolved like vaporous clouds.
You own every inch
of the footprints you leave in the snow.
Could we wander like you wander—a firefly
adrift above seas? Are you like a magnet lodged in a tree?
You teach us how little we control.
Do you make us wiser? We simply feel old.
Your end in the end will come before dawn:
the sun’s just a sun— your shadow alone will know that you’re gone.
Derek Mong is the author of two poetry collections from Saturnalia Books, Other Romes (2011) and The Identity Thief (2018). His chapbook, The Ego and the Empiricist (2017), was a finalist for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. An associate professor and the chair of the English Department at Wabash College, he holds degrees from Stanford, the University of Michigan, and Denison University. His poetry, essays, and translations have appeared widely, including in the LA Times, the Boston Globe, the Kenyon Review, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, Pleiades, Verse Daily, and the New England Review. The recipient of awards and fellowships from the University of Louisville, the University of Wisconsin, the Missouri Review, and Willapa Bay AiR, he lives in Indiana with his family. He and his wife, Anne O. Fisher, received the 2018 Cliff Becker Translation Award for The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin (White Pine, 2018). He is a contributing editor at Zócalo Public Square.