John Sibley Williams

Poetry

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), 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, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a 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.

Birds of Prey

Flags parade. Voices char. All fires hurry to ash, back to a silent gray earth, back to bullets pressed into a boy’s palm; a choice that is not really a choice at all. Just another slow-moving dawn & birds of prey break it like bones & everything seems worthless in its own way; brief & therefore wondrous. Men with eyes like windows with all the lights shut off & their own dead to attend to or atone for or both & a land that’s trying so hard to speak with its tongue cut out.

Self-Portrait as Travelogue

Say she’s the blur of a passing landscape. The lack of here when the road just keeps going regardless. A fistful of tangled wool blown free into a barbed fence. One of so many mile markers no one reads except when broken down & awaiting rescue. Say, in the years since she left us, the heart has made a weapon of forgetting, that the sky speaks its lightning quieter now, that the sky blushes sunset when we ask for a bit more time. But for this, the horizon we’re driving off into would scream forever. Say it’s okay to assume love will still be there when we enter the next town then the next, that all dirt roads lead to highway which lead to the sea. Say the sea & say it like you mean it. Trace her face on the rain- vagued window. Over the radio’s delicate static, repeat the names of the dead until they hurt again.
Listen:

John Sibley Williams

Poetry

John Sibley Williams is the author of eight collections, most recently Controlled Hallucinations, and the editor of two Northwest poetry anthologies. A five-time Pushcart nominee, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and Board Member of the Friends of William Stafford. A few previous publishing credits include: American Literary Review, Third Coast, Nimrod International Journal, Hotel Amerika, Rio Grande Review, Inkwell, Cider Press Review, Bryant Literary Review, Cream City Review, RHINO, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

The House Winter Built

This is the gap
between houses
spiked by fences
where certain birds gather
into a crowded warm plural
while others—today it just happens
to be a blue jay—are as kindled by solitude.


*


Standing here, divided by glass from a dawn
clouded as an early Polaroid, I count
two strands of footprints helixed for a while
ground down to one then to a faint red after-stain, everything
gradually erased by snow. In time

a becomes the, as in a fawn used to eat
the green from my lawn, as in all the deer
are gone now. I am haunted


*


by the space my body fills
and how little it matters
when my breath on the window
cools to winter.

If home is an invented place
why does it hurt so much
to leave?


*


There’s a pool of bells in the distance.
The knitted spine of a sycamore naked
and gray. Above the fence a thin slice of sky.
Above the sky a single galaxy uncoiling into millions

of lights. Many of the birds are as silent as light
but today on the fence between us there’s a blue jay
bold and alone, like someone I know I will lose
and still burn for.

“ Through various interconnected snapshots, ‘The House Winter Built’ endeavors to weave together a number of natural transitions in order to erase the false dichotomy of x or y. Autumn to winter, animal to human, life to death, together to apart, memory to the actuality of home, all exist on the same spectrum, often simultaneously. ”