Evan Williams
Bad Island
Everyone has entered into
something of a medieval shock.
They’ve come directly from the gill. Sutures of kittens
glare down from a glassy knoll. In fact,
I am not calm. Our house will one day open like a sore
and we will leak out.
The sun flares between spots of gore and baleen.
The space between us is quiet,
like a village of butterflies. The space between search and song.
––––
Bad Island
I admire your energy,
low and belted in dust.
Tales of wood lice or
termite lust
begin in terms like these.
You swoon all caught
in cotton, wasting pears
spooned and bled.
This was the end
of an era of nails.
We left bed then, tame, clucking as do ruins of castles. Soothed in the blight of chronic seances.
––––
Bad Island
The world is a tomb of woe, culling
bluebells. It begins at the mouth,
where it opens. Cunning,
how silhouettes summer
in the dim
saw of a solar dream.
We eat sandwiches before the berth
of twin lakes. Lint coils
in our teeth
to wilt.
––––
Bad Island
Wide owls sat thereupon the eye of a needle.
I cluttered narrowly into a coma,
spun up in hope. I had seen a view of the interior,
looking, and dipped in brooding fear.
The town was a mouth of foam
in my recollection. A vat of tar
spilled ‘round my family’s
beloved varmints.
I found you on a cliff
in the sunlight with your hair long
strangling a lost golfer.
Pleas fell before a stained fog. The ocean sang only in vowels.
––––
Evan Williams is a writer and law student based in Michigan. Their work appears in Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, SOLID STATE, and elsewhere.