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One must never place a loaded rifle on
the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep. —Chekhov, letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev Sometimes birds flatten into glass. Just like that, a deer charges break-neck into your car door, breaking its neck. Two weeks home & a soldier is turning his rifle heartward. A note we don’t have the language to read pinned to his chest. Sometimes all it takes is night. Stars silent as broken bells hanging lifeless from a derelict church. Our bodies not more or less than what we can touch. Yes, some-times we drop to our knees asking // wailing // pulling out the stitches. Still I believe // hope a gun written into our story can sit unused over our mantle, that some wildfires burn themselves out before we’ve been asked to gather what’s worth saving from our homes.
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John Sibley WilliamsJohn Sibley Williams is the editor of two Northwest poetry anthologies and the author of nine collections, including Disinheritance and Controlled Hallucinations. A ten-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors' Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Vallum Award for Poetry. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, 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. |
