2018-2019 WINNER, COG POETRY AWARDS
Incendiary Device
John Sibley Williams
The thought of all this country burning
beyond bright: unearthly colors buried
deep in the earth, released, incite the oak
to awe. Is it true this ruin has been ours
the whole time? The generations spent
praying to the heavens for a match tip,
the demons exorcised, returning every
evening in the familiar form of a father’s
fist. The fire is a blanket pulled over
the field, up to its eyes, to hide the monsters
imagined in our closet. Or to expose them
for what they are. The animals have
always been terrified of us. They know
something of love we admit only to night.
It turns out I was born with a matchbook
in my hands. I don’t need to reach out or up.
O the thought of this country, all these
homes dancing sparks into a hot & holy
starless sky. There’s a reason we refuse
to leave, even now. Is it true, father,
when the world finally says its name
it will be in our voice?
Epistemology
John Sibley Williams
Here is a back door writhing at its hinges.
Here is a lawn that was once a meadow
through my neglect rediscovering its wildness.
Here is the well-lit darkness of a barn
without a roof, sun catching & holding
the brilliance of idle tools. & some hay
no one has made love on in decades.
Splinter & lodge, here is the shrapnel
I’ve left behind in leaving things incomplete.
I have stood on the threshold of a father’s pride
wearing too many years to admire the damage
& I’m not sure how to explain myself
to myself. That there’s a kind of sovereignty
in walking away before time does what it must?
That the deer have returned? That we are all
parents of at least one thing & that thing need
not be pretty? Here is the story of the bruise
that only became a bruise in hindsight. That hurt
that only hurts in present tense. Sanctuary. Here
is the distance between here & there. I still can’t
decide if there is a place. Or here. Or if I’m sorry.
Pantomime
—for Jamaal May
John Sibley Williams
Outside sheets are pulling
back together into bodies.
The wind confuses sway
with dance, asks the dresses
there’s no one left to wear
for one more go before
the music ends. We wait
for the well out back to
illuminate its drowned coins,
all the gods overrun by prayers
to choose just this one to answer.
We beat the rain from hanging
undershirts & sing like nothing
the sky can do can rust the birds
from our mouths. We promise
our children the world
is forever, that this time
the wolves won’t show.
The fields are smoke
& through the smoke
figures materialize.
Deer that might be
mothers or sisters, gutshot,
looking for a slice of shadow
to die in. So many hanging trees
we confuse with men.
Dissolve
John Sibley Williams
That there were children here once
(calling these neon plains home
carving the men they dreamed of
becoming into cedar) & men (dissolving
moon-like into myth while their bodies continued
panning the dried out riverbeds for lost wildness)
& mothers (braiding light through their daughters’ hair)
& believe it or not animals (goddamn everywhere) clustered
together for warmth taking winter deep in-
to their lungs & giving back plume childbearing
hills untapped oil reservoired beneath them more stars
than a nation could excise in a century a sky deprived
of its knives That there are now utility roads
bearing their names that snake along the pipeline That we take
these roads That regardless we keep taking these roads
The Sacred
John Sibley Williams
Someone is cramming notes into a wall
she knows no one will ever read.
Someone is banging her head into a wall
as prayer
which works for a time.
All the sacred
openings of her body have been filled
so often by men without the necessary
permissions
borders don’t mean keep out anymore
& there is no such thing as stay
safely inside.
Someone is plugging up the holes in the wall
with starlings her son strangled with his bare hands.
That there is no father is a blessing. Blessed,
what she once called my light is turning into
such a fine boy.
All around her,
waves of holy people wash in & out, wail & wail
then walk sixteen miles home for rice & fish.
Someone’s heart is quiet as a prison yard.
Someone has more paper than prayers. Light
suffers through the cracks in the wall,
ricochets off into the city, then sand.
She pulls another bird from her box of dead birds.
The Promise
John Sibley Williams
The wind shifts the smoke
southward like winter birds
over neighboring towns I was raised
to hate for reasons even my father
can’t remember, over horses &
wilder dogs, empty silos, broken
fences, hills stripped of coal, long
stretches of placelessness; then farther
& farther to villages no longer starred
on maps & cities the movies
depict as beautiful violences,
neon-lit & sleepless; finally
skimming across open oceans
like hard-thrown stones to where
people look up to us as beacons
of light, praying so fiercely with all
their bodies for a chance to breathe
what I cannot clear from my lungs.
...But I love
rooms and cities I'll never return to, and once
I loved a man for how he damaged me.
—Jennifer Chang
"Reading these poems, it’s evident that John Sibley Williams is a poet with complete control. The texture of his lines is rich and precise. The syntax demands attention and participation. As readers we get the pleasure of untangling each sentence, each line, into not just meaning, but an accumulation of surprising language and images. The speaker in these poems says, I’m not sure how to explain myself / to myself. These poems don’t falsely posture with knowledge, but rather, present us with a catalog of curiosities, a longing to understand all the things we are afraid to name."
—Hieu Minh Nguyen