John Sibley Williams (3 poems)
Benediction
—for Kaveh Akbar
Graceless. No, so much less than that.
The physicality of the soul sours what
little we take away from a church bell’s
ritual. Iron & echo. The songbird pressing
circles into its hollow to shape a nest no
mouths will hunger from. Hunger or shriek.
Like a fabric, the fabric of morning tears
too easily to call it mercy. Or home. Shot
through with light the loose gravel we
shoot at the roosting sparrows. We never
seem as broken as that, do we? Lives not
forgeries so much as too-little-at-stake.
Tenancy
Lights across the river.
Entire cities of them
blinking in & back out
of existence. Night-
swallowed;
as if life
depends upon seeing life
fade in others.
Competition:
There’s only so much darkness
to go around.
Compensation:
our pupils dilate to take it all in.
Gods:
pronouned to fit what we hope
to see on the other shore.
Shores hung together by fog
& pure stubbornness.
Tonight, like a mouth closing;
just chewed-over memories
between us
bright as we can make them,
briefly & brightly, & merciful.
Ligature
Missing 19-year-old student feared victim of sex trafficking
—The Independent headline, 11/8/17
Before we know what our bodies are worth
or for, someone comes along to teach us.
Rifled through, edges torn, discarded
like old photos of family gone strange,
disremembered. Like the lost youth
in every mirror. There is a white
windowless van inside every heart.
A show of force multiplied by desire,
privilege. Isn’t that how we know we’re men?
This part of you that hasn’t yet a name,
I will name. The parts you never knew
could bleed, will. I promise it
won’t be so different than the first time.
Just more so. More so. Every body’s born
a repository for another body’s flame.
John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another(Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory(Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Summon(JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. A nineteen-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Laux/Millar Prize, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize, and others. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a poetry editor and literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review,Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.