Derek Chan

Future-Perfect

—After Hana Widerman

Tonight, the wind scatters
the salt

from your hands
across half the Pacific. 

Your face
is floating beneath blue lamps 

as you write
about geographies of desire 

& the sea taking away
your possessions. 

Beyond the bus window,
shadows of yellow

trees blow back and forth. 

I am carrying your absence
like a wet briefcase. 

I am running
under stars who know
nothing

about the light they are no longer.

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Derek Chan is a writer and educator from Melbourne, Australia. He is an MFA graduate of Cornell University, where he was a university fellow, an editor of EPOCH Journal and a two-time recipient of the Corson-Browning Poetry Prize. Additionally, he holds a First-Class Honours in Literary Studies from Monash University, where he received the Arthur Brown Thesis Prize. He is currently a lecturer at Cornell University, where he teaches creative writing and academic composition. His work has appeared in Best of Australian Poems, Australian Poetry Anthology, Oxford Poetry, Cordite Poetry Review, The Margins and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, and has been short-listed for awards by the Forward Prize, Frontier Poetry and Palette Poetry.