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.
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