my dead work their fingers through my son’s
gnarled & knotted hair wilded already
from my touch ligatures i hope translate
lovingly once the damage is done & my
apologies all played out can be seen as
rehearsal for the burning house he’ll inherit
×
an unmothered bird that plumeless factory writing
itself all over the horizon i tell him nothing
out there will hurt more than this brief kiss
not the steel-springed horses rusted & reddening
in a park in a town that’s forgotten how to child
not the bloodied noses of this is mine everything
here is mine & divvying up the world unevenly
like shot marbles not these fingers relentlessly combing
my dreams through his sleep our dead only as dead as
×
a sung-out lullaby raptured as the snapped steeple
down the street the birds congregate on snagged &
unforgiven as barbed woolen tufts once the wolves
have done their worst another fence & feast & goodnight
not that our horses ever needed breaking this field
forever fallow springs rooted to hard earth this map
leading home always back home forgive me son
this kiss as innocent as i can make it
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 23, Issue 1.
John Sibley Williams won the 2020 Cider Press Review Book Award for his manuscript, Scale Model of a Country at Dawn. Williams is the author of six other collections, including The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). A twenty-six-time Pushcart nominee, he is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series.
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