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Derek Henderson
A Fifth To Redden
I'll spend hours eating all your kisses
A feast for me from dusk til dawn
Eat them all, sour tart,
Some with sugar, some with blood.
I'll beat the devil's maw for swallowing
And fill a prophet's head with food for thought
And spill my grains at Hades' grave.
What I leave at table
Is food for sterner mouths
No tiny snack - men's skins fill and fatten
With careless suffering
When you give more than a kiss to eat:
Through broken teeth the fatter ones will tell
Unless their swollen tongues forsake them
That dusk's end is no mere dawn
But a gorgeous rising in their gorge.
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Derek Henderson is alive and well in Salt Lake City. He is the author of Thus & co-author, with Derek Pollard, of Inconsequentia. At present, his favorite quote is Ashbery's assertion that "You can't say it that way anymore. / Bothered about beauty, you have to / Come out into the open, into a clearing / And rest."
A Fifth To Redden was published in our Fall/Winter 2011 issue, The Lives of the Saints.
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The new TLR issue, The Glutton's Kitchen, is out. Featuring poetry from Natalie Eilbert, Jameson Fitzpatrick, Deborah Landau, and Michael Bazzett, an amazing memoir by Alison Gruber, and new fiction from Robert Lopez, Katrin Tschirigi, and Robert Earle... to name only a few of the wonderful writers who contributed to this issue.
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