John Sibley Williams

Origin of Topography

Your face is an atlas. That look you’d give me

between sobrieties just another red valley
mapped among mountains. A whole village

down there. Paper mills. Horses. Bars. Vats in every yard
for when the rains end. Thirst. Radios crackling with war.
A house to rebuild & re-burn. Not to be confused with rage,

these raging winds. How they dance the chaff of
winnowed wheat. It’s all self-

flagellation. Take the animal out & we are still animals.

Isn’t that what they say about beauty? That it is never more itself
as when its absence hurts. Hurts

like a series of streams ending in a river that too ends
in ocean.

Something like salt, like rubbing salt into wounds, like loving
despite & because of. This field

that is your body coming down hard on smaller bodies is the field I’ll return to,

tenderly, until there’s no returning left me.

John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. A twenty-three-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize, Philip Booth Award, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a freelance poetry editor and literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, North American Review, Midwest Quarterly, The Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, and various anthologies.