John Sibley Williams is the author of five collections, most recently As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska
Press, 2019), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize, forthcoming 2020). A twenty-three-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for
Poetry, Philip Booth Award, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a poetry editor and literary agent.
Headlight-brightened bodies pass by, briefly, before blackening again in the nameless expanse of gulch & grass. One could almost say illusion, that all this seeing is a trick the light plays to keep us rooted in place. In this case, driver, subject. If things worked out differently, we’d be out there wandering the object-heavy… Read more →
Orphaned, night goes around undoing everythingwe thought we’d built to outlast us. This slight starlight graffitis its nameup & down the schoolhouse wall. No Trespass means nothing to the bulletsthe wind carries from our hands, outward. Because ash is always plural, dawn doesn’t botherstacking the living together before burning.
There’s just no scrubbing dawn clean enough to heal last night, or the night before; no muscling gray into motives, wine back into the bottle, its shattering into an intact object passed between hands to warm them. × I never knew words could be coffins. Or I did but didn’t care. Which of us is boxed up & ready for… Read more →
