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.
John Sibley Williams is the author of five collections, most recently As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). A twenty-five-time Pushcart nominee, John 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. He works as a poetry coach, editor, and literary agent. Previous publishing credits include Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and various anthologies.