#jess williard

[mercuriopoetry]

But rain only allows one kind of sadness to make sense, and this is about snow: its gentle insistence, how it hushes minutes into months, makes a covered mouth of wherever it lands.

But also:

Something about magnitude in loss, then.

Effigy by Jess Williard on terrain.org

I really like the way he interprets and weaves temporality and order in this poem, how the scene slowly and apparently unordered unfolds. I started looking for his poems after reading about his most recent book, Unmanly grief. I'll keep a tab on him.

[gunbf]

reading list for the next 2 weeks, putting it here so i can keep track & all that :)

☄️ unmanly grief by jess williard

☄️ thief in the interior by phillip williams

☄️ god had a body by jennie malboeuf

☄️ notes for my body double by paul guest

[marknoa]

A Man in the Stands

Because a boy named Clif was taken below the away team bleachers and beaten  by a stranger in a trench coat, there’s a game the boys play where they push  one another into the darkened hovel and box each other’s ears till they are dizzy,  then run. I can hear the muffs and open- palmed punches between laughs and pleading shrieks. I can feel the trellised  benches shake, can almost reach through,  grab the collars and say Enough. He’s had enough. To reach through is to reach back,  and it’s 2003. Lean deeper down between the seats and its 1994. Actually grasp at one of their shoulders and it’s 1989 where Clif is waiting in a badly lit pediatric unit to be adopted, his parents four states away strangling the classifieds in a week-old newspaper. The call,  the five-hour drive. An infant swaddled in a Motel 6 dresser drawer. The summer stars wet and brilliant above. But before he’s taken home, a nurse comes to his crying, cradles his head and traces each of his small ears with her thumb. Enough.  That’s enough. Eased into silence, he sleeps.  Someone gropes blindly through the ceiling.  - Jess Williard