Poetry, Derek Graf
The piss-drunk god blows his snot on your memory.
Your antagonist is hotter than you could ever be.
He tucks his sunglasses into the collar of his V-neck.
On the highway you fantasize about being a great dad.
Childhood: the thud of a tetherball against your temple.
You drink too much at dinner with her parents.
Dropping your phone to distant laughter.
You try reading the New Testament from a secular perspective and find yourself weeping anyway.
The blacked-out widower eyes you across the bar.
At night it’s so quiet you hear your neighbor giggling through her dreams.
The argument outside the pawnshop really resonates with your ideas about history.
Your antagonist calls your ex without even talking to you about it first.
In the winter of 2018 you gained twenty pounds and no one seemed to notice.
Now that piss-drunk god blows his load all over the cemetery.
This resonates fully with your ideas about democracy.
You try reading this poem from a Christian perspective but your antagonist
walks by in his V-neck with your ex and he’s so fucking goddamn hot it ruins the ending.
Derek Graf's first poetry collection, Green Burial, won the 2021 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award for a First or Second Book of Poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Journal, Sixth Finch, Meridian, and elsewhere.
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