Evan Williams

Drowning is not nearly swift enough, most will say. A week shows up all at once, carrying the handsome down of a day in its arms. I have seen blue and blown it sky high. No hand comes down. Maybe a lure, a hook to take. A promise with a long line. I frown with pointed edges at promise. I cannot hold in my hands my own hands any longer. My castle is buttressed by a moat of recession. I have seen sky and gone blue at its height. I would not go if I were you. I am going and can tell you all about it later.

I am falling beneath you from on high to simulate submission. I have pulled the cloud lever, I have leveled the clouds. The salesman said we were in need of an inverse convection. He looked like a trapeze in repose. He’d shown a diagram of a razor, which was just a blade in his hand. It cut through the air but we had no need. You ping in the foreground. You blow away. The silence then is a translation of transition.

A remote monster mentors terror. I hammer and rearrange the ferryman,
femme and stammer dripping in my colander helmet. I warm them,
the many men from the greenspace who vow or revalue velvet.
An avalanche is halted by tar, melts and restarts. I drip into the helmet helmet.
Used to be you would have me kill butterflies.

Evan Williams is a Chicago-based poet interested in the collision of surrealism and the natural world. Their work can be read in DIAGRAM, New Orleans Review, Indiana Review, or at tallmansgarden.com.