Archipelago
In a room with many
windows but no doors
I wanted to be
reminded of a silence
that is lived
and not made.
A ship sailing past
carries the scent
of oranges and continues
into the vacant heat.
I don’t imagine
there’ll be a hand.
Listening for a love
of endings I almost
hear the Mediterranean
sunlight pouring into
the blue bowls
on the battlement.
Did you want the sea?
Here’s the sea—
brittle air, sweet
tatters of blood, pages
floating face-up
in the current, cold
ripples at the ankles
of no one who feels it.
Ars Poetica in a Dying Field
& this is how I walked into
a language so dark
it meant I was no longer
anyone to call myself
enough or nothing.
In the dying field,
this was everything.
Dusk burning the old
grasses until it changed
the air into leaf-rot
& flicker—diaphanous
syllables wavering above
the black feed of earth.
I could not see it,
or refused to see it.
The pen said to the tree—
or perhaps to the jaguar
crouched in the tree—I long
for the hand which opens
and closes above me
like an unfailing lilac.
I was nothing else
but alive, falling through
branches like five gashes
of a voice. I reached for
the pen, now buried in dirt.
If I was nothing;
if I will write myself
out of a place so dark
even night becomes another
stranger. I thought the sound
of a hand moving over us
meant we were dying, said the jaguar.
The tree opened its mouthful
of nothing. No, it means there is still a word
for where you and I are from.
Derek Chan is a writer and educator from Melbourne, Australia. He is an MFA graduate of Cornell University, where he was a university fellow, an editor of EPOCH journal, and a two-time recipient of the Corson-Browning Poetry Prize. Additionally, he holds a First-Class Honours in Literary Studies from Monash University, where he received the Arthur Brown Thesis Prize. He is currently a lecturer at Cornell University, teaching creative writing and academic composition. His work has appeared in Best of Australian Poems, Australian Poetry Anthology, Oxford Poetry, Cordite Poetry Review, The Margins, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the 2024 Forward Prize for the Best Single Written Poem. He has received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, and has been shortlisted for awards by Frontier Poetry and Palette Poetry.