nest

i spend the morning a magpie,
gathering milk teeth with gold fillings.
i keep swallowing glittercrude trinkets
& hope my guts will glimmer,
but gimcrack jewelry shines false,
gorgeous as a beak
broken after biting too hard
on a pearl mistaken for a seed.

little confetti castle,
wadded with used tissue,
decorated with glint baubles—
let me call even the glisten
of a glass sliver harbor.
call anywhere home,
a nest that does not burn
with me still inside.

genderfluent

 every day shakes me loose,
doritos bag dangling
from the vending machine’s
last empty coil.
every day, i am dissolved
like a wad of gum
carried across the city
on the bottom of a boot.

every day i am tenor
singing the vehicle
of my silly little metaphors.
no, let me tell you about desire.

ha ha, just kidding.
i know nothing about desire

you cannot learn from bridging language
to the body. i know nothing of languor
i cannot learn trying, and failing,
to make sense of gender.

no, I won’t explain. i’m too exhausted.

delirium in c sharp minor

 we wobble our bicycles
down a hill dallyswift
into incoming traffic,
bodies hobbled
by the fossil
of possibility.
we trouble the line
between the obvious
& epiphany,
naming every dumb
utterance worthy
of being bibled
in some god-sobbed scrapbook.

we’re malleable,
each debacle
of scraped knee
& bruised elbow
capable of turning
folly into revelation.
we say remember this
& forget
even the names
of the half-notes trembling
between twin broken bells.
we cobble together
whatever is left of song,
the warble of a dew-ruined trumpet.

Derek Berry is the author of the novel Heathens & Liars of Lickskillet County (PRA, 2016), and the poetry chapbooks Glitter Husk and Buggery, recipient of the BOOM Chapbook Prize from Bateau Press. Derek is also the recipient of the Emrys Poetry Prize, KAKALAK Poetry Award, Broad River Prize for Prose, and other honors. Their work has appeared recently in beestung, ANMLY, Gigantic Sequins, Beloit Poetry Journal, Carolina Muse, and elsewhere.  Their podcast Contribute Your Verse explores creativity & community through essays, interviews, & experimentations. They live in Aiken, South Carolina, where they work as a museum education coordinator & freelance editor.