Planes swim circles around our small pond of sky.
Murky, bottomless, the kind of heaven heroes far
greater than us struggled to return from, failing.
We tell these stories over campfires & cradles.
Each ends with a lesson only the children undead
in us can hear, make sense of, apply to the waking
world. Overhead, hundreds of families circumnavigate
a single strip of tarmac fogged in by December’s freeze.
Dollops of snow, hauntingly intimate, forever foreign,
mercurial, weightlessly weigh down their wings. & I am
going nowhere, waiting here in the cellphone parking lot
for my dead parents to call & say we’ve finally touched down,
son, & don’t worry; our arms are empty with gifts.
–
John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize) and Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University Nebraska Press). A nineteen-time Pushcart nominee and winner of various awards, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review. Publications include: Yale Review, Atlanta Review, Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, and Third Coast.