Read More: A brief interview with John Sibley Williams
Sour Milk Sky
We’ve spilled it all over the cold kitchen floor & cried.
Lapped up the stale yellow puddles like good little children.
Organized its stars into arbitrary beasts based on stories that died
out before our grandfathers’ grandfathers’ gods were hauled to this new
world in the shackled bellies of cargo ships. Themselves slight variations
on the captain’s gods. Or vice versa. The sound a man makes from his knees
in prayer or defeat differs only in pitch. The sky, still hungry. The sky drips
off the lip of the table like gunfire. Fallen stars. Bodies. Like tears held inside
so long they’ve curdled.
Seismic
Everything not nailed down threatens to topple onto
our new rug made from skinned dead things.
A confusion of tongues on television argue
tectonics vs. rapture; how the terrified rally
around finalities that refuse, in the end, to end.
The unlistened-to music birthing islands,
mountains, oceans, their trenches, just to sweep
them all away: for the moment an aria
of broken dinner plates & collapsed promises.
I promise them there’s enough room beneath
this doorframe for three. There are four of us.
In the absence of a stable earth I promise […]
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In the New World
Fallen kingdom, overtaken first by rot
then weeds then construction of a new
face that reflects the same sun at exactly
the same angle as the first. Everything
the color of lightning zigzagging down
to touch, so gently, burning, a crown […]
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John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize) and Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize). An eleven-time Pushcart nominee and winner of various awards, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review. Publications include: Yale Review, Atlanta Review, Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, and Third Coast.
Read More: A brief interview with John Sibley Williams