Derek Mong is the author of four poetry collections, including When the Earth Flies into the Sun (Saturnalia Books, 2024). Individual poems, essays, and translations have appeared widely: the LA Times, the Boston Globe, the Kenyon Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, and the New England Review. He and his wife, Anne O. Fisher, received the Cliff Becker Translation Award for The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin (White Pine Press); they also co-edit the literary journal At Length. He currently lives in Indiana, where he chairs the English Department at Wabash College. He's a contributing editor at Zócalo Public Square.
Poems in this episode:
Poem 1: To a Future Mass Shooter by Derek Mong
If I could touch you
I’d touch you where your wrist meets your hand.
Your tendon relaxes like grass bending to the sand.
Set down your duffel.
Let it grow into a dune.
The shoreline here flashes like a faded cartoon.
~
Do your victims complete you like family or a creed?
Do their names fill your evenings
like the hum of cable TV?
Tell me yours. I’ll write it down here
if that would just end it.
I’ve few readers, but they’re kinder than Reddit.
~
You must know that you haunt us already.
Can you see our deaths
predate you? (They’re like waves—distant, but steady.)
Our children rise up in their swings
and never come down.
Our screen doors swing open— no one’s home, no one’s home.
~
Light me a cigarette; pour me a shot.
Let us do—at this driftwood table—what your dark tools cannot.
The sun
will soon tan us back into ash—
why not raise a glass to our bodies’ slow rot?
from When the Earth Flies into the Sun (2024, Saturnalia Books)
Poem 2: “Book Sale” by Christine Kwon from “A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue”
Listen to another poem by Derek Mong featured on Verse Daily.
Online examples of Derek’s poems mention in this podcast:
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