Derek Jon Dickinson is a writer and photographer living in Minnesota, United States. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Transformations: An Oxford Flash Fiction Anthology (UK), Naugatuck River Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Manhattan Review, Dunes Review, Cordite Poetry Review (Australia), The MacGuffin and others. His waterfowl photography has been published by Ducks Unlimited.

Small Gas Engines

(for D.R.D.)

I set the choke and prime
the carburetor, the piston gulps
for air.

I phone my father to tell him I
hate these damned things,

every time you need them
they’re paying you back for some
misspelled word in a run-on
sentence.

He doesn’t hear that I’m not
calling about engines, I’ve called
to commiserate;

but the things behind
the engines are awkward.

On the driveway, snow
piles up, husks of unanswered
prayers;

I squint into the swirling night
to find their origin.

In my hand, the bent
shovel and requisite work that
keeps us silent,

silently struggling behind
our requisite work.

Postcards

(for A.M.D.)

Fisherman’s Wharf—San Francisco

Brined in endemic smells, steamed
shells and sweets; storefronts
clatter, confections take their window
seats.

Retail-racks hold-open
doors, commerce loaded
in the till—fortune
shakes hands with usual elusive
promise.

Somewhere it rained tourists up the
hill. Trickling down in enigmatic
convergence. By noon, the flood
swelling to anonymous.

Hungry hands feeding on
knick-knacks and racks of the letters’
thriftier cousin. The size of a thought, the
dimension of a mention. A one-sided
conversation, naked yet modest.

The mightiest flightpaths’ tiny
headwaters, tossed in a bag of
strangers; arrive stamped, bent and
sometimes slurred. Reveal nothing—like
a hotel room—of whose eyes have
slept in them.

Years ago, just before I left, dropped
a handful of words in Bucharest, solely
to imagine something desperate to get
back to me.

I watch tourists comb for words
they’ll only find here; pick out two
postcards of my own—bright and
pithy as poems.

The first one I use for
a bookmark, pen the second at a
wobbly table stamped
with my beer.

The birds play catch with a
lifeless minnow, sea-lions disappear
like they just had an idea. The
aluminum bay ripples.

I scribble-in as best
I can, address it to a friend. The one
who keeps things, who
knows we are a few words and
wherever we put them.

Parked Near the Lakewalk in January

Canal Park—Duluth, Minnesota

Spring renews. Summer loves. Autumn
kilns. Winter curates:

Eviscerated sun, bone-brittle
cold. The bundles
shuffle along, their breaths seep out
like wounds;

while the combustion
engine wraps me in a blanket
of hot wind, and so-on, until I can’t
afford feeding it.

I set down
my book, settle-in to the frigid
theater outside the grime-swept
windshield.

Thankful for all
of it; the taconite city, the wintering
ore boats. Somewhere in
the clanking cold, a man buckles
trains together;

saying sincerely and firmly into
history, they talk too much. Meaning
posterity, meaning me.

A woman stops. From her woolen
arms, gently pours out a puppy. It wags its
tail. She claps her mittens, tucks it
under her arm like a purse.

A man walks out on
the icy pier. Finds nothing. Not a
trace of friendship. Returns to follow
the shore, piled high
with Superior’s broken glass;

walks a little, then stops
again. Sun tossed
over his shoulder, shadow hinged
like a pocketknife;

takes a long
labyrinth-look at the
abandoned lake;

standing like
intimation, as we do in
front of great chasms, innocent
and legible as greeting-cards;

postured in
prelude, as though we’ll
think our way across. Strum
the old questions, the ones that
have broken us.