Still Birth
—Derek Chan
Still Birth
Gather from the azaleas, where the blue was torn
from my brother’s bare hands. The year I was born,
I crawled into a milk pail, searching for a place
empty enough to be held. Before my eyes, petals fell
like tiny shadows above water becoming water.
When the body dies, something must shiver in its place.
I think of him now, the way winter thinks of a moth
as a pale telegram tapping the window. I am terrified
of how I might open.
About
DEREK CHAN is an MFA graduate of Cornell University, where he was an editor of EPOCH, and a two-time recipient of the Corson-Browning Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in Best of Australian Poems, Oxford Poetry, The Margins, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, and has been a finalist for awards by the Forward Prize, Frontier Poetry, and Palette Poetry. He currently teaches creative writing and academic composition at Cornell University.