Decorum

Looking out
into the river
from the 17th
floor: how
impolite to
die here, hitting
the ground,
and bleeding
out into a starfish
spread, losing
face like getting
caught masturbating
in trenches
outside Alsace,
nervous
and half-weeping,
while gun
shells fly
over head.
Dreams of nudity
amongst friends
do not cause shame
but dying where
the language
sounds unfamiliar
and remains
chirping like
listening to
the Beatles’
White Album
backwards,
shell-shocked,
is bad manners.

Derick Varn has a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at Georgia College and State University where he served as assistant editor for Arts and Letters: A Journal of Contemporary Arts. He has served as managing editor for the now defunct Milkwood Review. He won the Frankeye Davis Mayes/Academy of American Poets Prize in 2003 and has recently published poems in Backwards City Review, Cartier Street Review, JMWW Magazine, and Unlikely Stories 2.0. He currently lives Yongin-si, South Korea during the academic year and in Macon, Georgia during the summer season. During the day he works as a full-time Instructor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies’ English Translation and Interpretation Department and at night he writes and paints.

Photo by Ömer Ünlü.