Poem of the Week

Flies

Derrick Austin

I waste the morning in bed eating Talenti and chocolate-
covered almonds infused with cannabis.

The only people I’ve talked to in weeks are the father
and son who own the corner store.

The father blocked me on a meat market of an app.
My ego compulsively licks its wounds.

Your type, a friend texts me, is the kind of man
Lee Pace could play in his sleep: cerebral, imperious.

Books cover the other half of my bed.
In the one I’ve nearly finished, a prince becomes a hermit,

his soul growing receptive and active
like a plant consuming green flies.

Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness, winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water.
Originally published:
September 8, 2021

Featured

Rachel Cusk

The novelist on the “feminine non-state of non-being”
Merve Emre

Books

Renaissance Women

A new book celebrates—and sells short—Shakespeare’s sisters
Catherine Nicholson

Fady Joudah

The poet on how the war in Gaza changed his work
Aria Aber

You Might Also Like

Poem of the Week

There is An Intimacy

Melissa Lozada-Oliva

Poem of the Week

(W)HOLE

Chet’la Sebree

Poem of the Week

Geese

Robert Travers

Newsletter

Sign up for The Yale Review newsletter and keep up with news, events, and more.