Suburban Myths
Somewhere there are houses
with half-collapsed roofs
like someone learning how to cry
and broken steps that lead
nowhere near a door
and there are lights on
in these fabled houses
and mothers stretched raw
over kettles
and haunting the windows
children’s faces
that look so much like the faces
of the children hurling stones
that nobody can be certain
which direction things shatter
Waxed In
Relegated to the tiny wooden bow
of a glassed-in ship
that once knew blue.
Words are what remain
when wild expanse
turns inward, calms.
Collectors say the past
can be painted any color
but the real.
Our vessel is one
dusty inch of shelf
above a burning hearth.
Has it always been like this?
Life accessed through a bottleneck
to reveal a universe of unkindled matchsticks
carefully constructed of glue and where the heart’s been.
Nostalgia
I am what is missing
from yesterday’s photograph.
You can clearly make out
blue swimming trunks
concealing what once were legs.
You can tell there should be arms
to keep her from falling.
Behind: an ocean
folding and breaking.
The sun: leaving its mark
on the absence of a body.
Everywhere: a pit, so like love,
rimmed in faltering light.
This is what remains
of that summer by the sea:
her figure forever leaning into open air
and the sand wearing my ghost
like a broken window.
One Third
Always stretching toward completion,
this fractional body
continues beyond its simple sequence,
beyond repeating digits and molecules,
bone and evening.
Well into morning
where things begin again
to hope for night,
I move
by simply drawing breath.
Across my infinity
of trailing integers.
Against the façade
of whole and part.
To enter the world like this,
inked by permanence—
an undefined number on a page
in this book that’s only skin.
An Empty Flagpole
You are a wind
choked by people,
entering a dangerous conversation
with the fumes people release
in believing.
Your absence
is a body
caged by voices
arguing over your song—
colliding, collapsing
your corners into triangles
for others to lament
in passing,
and I’m thinking of a letter
sent stampless and empty
endlessly handed down
from city to city,
how it finds its place
eventually
like us all
in the circular current
of a wind
choked to death
by people
and song,
the scarred outline
of meaning.
John Sibley Williams is the author of Controlled Hallucinations (FutureCycle Press, 2013) and six poetry chapbooks. He is the winner of the HEART Poetry Award, and finalist for the Pushcart, Rumi, and The Pinch Poetry Prizes. John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review, co-director of the Walt Whitman 150 project, and Marketing Director of Inkwater Press. A few previous publishing credits include: Third Coast, Inkwell, Cider Press Review, Bryant Literary Review, Cream City Review, The Chaffin Journal, The Evansville Review, RHINO, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
