Derek Mong was born in Portland, OR and lives in Louisville, KY where he holds the 2008-2010 Axton Poetry Fellowship at the University of Louisville. His poetry, prose, and translations have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. He appeared on A River & Sound Review (#20), recorded live on Orcas Island. 

Mong says: "'Thumbprint' is the only poem I've ever written in using isoverbal prosody. 'Lines from the Emperor Hadrian and the Poet P. Annius Florus' follows the poetic exchange between a poet, historian, and rhetorician and Rome's third emperor in the Nervan-Antonian Dynasty."

Read his other poems:

Heft

Lines from the Emperor Hadrian and the Poet P. Annius Florus

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Table of Contents

Thumbprint

by Derek Mong

    Why are you sleeping                thumbs—

                  Numb when I woke           up,

          Little soda thimbles? Did               you

Pass out in candle            wax

        By-product from writing nocturnal              poetic

                Scholarship, Pentameter for       Dummies?

My guess? You’re tickling          some

                Dream girl, real no          body

        Hitchhiking Tijuana. Could you        maybe

Return by breakfast, and            cut

         The wandering? I’ll drop              my

                 Spoon without your opposing            nerve.