Aperture

by John Sibley Williams

 

I know the hinges give me away. To be this open
requires doors. Night-sealed, dead bolted, rusted,
shedding blood-colored dust. Roughly the size of
the world, the world that enters is sweet as a head
of foam scraped off a teacup, unforgiving as an Old
Testament story. The god I used to think I was loved
pain. Distance. & starlings. He’d dare his bike faster
down unpaved paths & relish the fall. Show the scars
off to everyone at school. Invent entire mythologies
to explain the stars, where they go in winter. Where
my mother went. Silent house. & frostbite. The rest
was just a parable. A paraffin river. Holy. It’s simple
enough: where there is no memory, nothing happened.
So nothing that happened hurt. I’m not sure what
changed, but these days the doorframe shutters &
yields in certain weathers. The fence posts I had
hammered down remain a bit longer in place. Then
they give too. An empty house testifies to everything
it once held. Held or holding? Both in- or egress.

---

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-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 works as a freelance poetry editor and literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: Yale Review, North American Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, and various anthologies.