Joshua’s Bright Lily

Derek Pollard

A single peacock
Feather ablaze in
The tree’s winter bran
Ches

Each shivering
Angel the glint of
Our desire 

New year
Come sudden, Joshua’s
Bright lily verily
At the end of our
Last dead season

This
Sky is mine, this dome
Is mine, this heart is
Mine, even though it
Is yours and is a
Lone always

The sun
Brought to the horizon’s
Builded slant, two rams
Tupping at the bor
Der of Heaven, gold
So loud there is no
Other

These are the
Names we pass one to
Another

First the
Shiver, then the glint

Derek Pollard is editor of the critical anthology Till One Day the Sun Shall Shine More Brightly: The Poetry and Prose of Donald Revell (University of Michigan Press) and co-author with Derek Henderson of the poetry collection Inconsequentia (BlazeVOX Books). His writing has been published in Best of the Net, Drunken Boat, Edgar Allan Poe Review, Pleiades, Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak, and They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, among numerous other anthologies and journals. His multimedia work has been performed and exhibited throughout the United States.

Previously, he served as Associate Editor at Interim: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, where he launched and edited the journal's quarterly online issues and co-edited the annual print volume; as Poetry and Nonfiction Editor at Witness, where he co-edited the annual print volume and served as organizer and liaison for author events at the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute (BMI); and as Associate Editor at New Issues Poetry & Prose, where he selected and edited books for the New Issues Poetry Prize and the Green Rose Prize.

He holds a PhD in English from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was a BMI Fellow in Poetry, and is Professor of English at the Flagship Campus of Keiser University.