Phillip B. Williams

A monstrosity in the alley. A many-bodied movement grouped for terror, their flights’ brief shadows on the kitchen curtains, on the street’s reliquaries of loose squares and hustle. Some minds are groomed for defiance. The youngest calls out his territory with muscular vowels where street light spills peculiar, his hand a chorus of heat and recoil. “Could have been a doctor” say those who knew and did not know him, though he never wanted to know what gargles endlessly in a body — wet hives, planets unspooled from their throbbing shapes. There are many ways to look at this. He got what he wished against. He got wings on his shoes for a sacrifice. The postulate that stars turn a blind eye to the cobalt corners of rooms is incorrect. Light only helps or ruins sight. Daylight does cruel things to a boy’s face.

A storm and so a gift. Its swift approach lifts gravel from the road. A fence is flattened in the course of   the storm’s worse attempt at language — thunder’s umbrage. A tree is torn apart, blown upward through a bedroom window. A boy winnows through the pile of shards for the sharpest parts from the blown-apart glass. He has a bag that holds found edges jagged as a stag’s horns or smooth as a single pane smashed into smaller panes that he sticks his hand into to make blood web across his ache-less skin flexing like fish gills O-lipped for a scream it cannot make. He wants to feel what his friends have felt, the slant of fear on their faces he could never recreate, his body configured without pain. When his skin’s pouting welts don’t rake a whimper from his mouth, he runs outside, arms up for the storm, aluminum baseball bat held out to the sky until lightning with an electric tongue makes his viscera luminescent; the boy’s first word for pain is the light’s new word for home.

After “E. 1999 Eternal” by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony Dear god of armed robberies and puff-puff-pass, a chalk outline unpeels from the street, smashes every windshield, and leaves florid temples of crack on porches. Burnt-black pleats of   joint-pressed lips prophesied your return. Please accept these nickel bags as offerings. Brick bastions of piss-stench thresholds and boarded windows require a weekly sacrifice. Is there a Tarot card called “The Corner,” a shrike shown lifting a corpse from the pike of a middle finger? Children speak to their murdered brothers with a cereal box and construction paper cut into a Ouija’s tongue that licks yes when asked if   liquor could polish a skull in a way pleasing to the dead, licks no when asked for a name.

What can I do but make of the eyes of others my own eyes, but make of the world a ghazal whose radif is a haunting of me, me, me? Somewhere there are fingers still whole to tell the story of the empire that devours fingers. Somewhere there is a city where even larvae cannot clean the wounds of the living and cannot eat on the countless dead who are made to die tomorrow and tomorrow. Carrion beetles and boot bottoms grind corpses powder-soft to feed the small-mouthed gods of gardens and wind. Roses made to toss their silk to earth like immolated gowns, hills spewing ribbons of charred air from cities occupied by artillery and pilfered grain, limbs blown from their bodies and made into an alphabet that builds this fool song, even now, presented before you as false curative, as vacant kiss — even what is lost in the fabrication of strangers needs naught from strangers. Even somewhere stings with stillness, stings with a home not surrendered but a given. • But I have not been with my feet on the earth there where bullets make use of skin like flags make use of the land. My thinking is as skeletal as the bombed-out schools and houses untelevised. What do I know of occupation but my own colonized thinking to shake free from. While my days themselves tremble from time and shake off place to feel falsely placeless, a hollow empathy as if its soft chisel could make of this wall — my ignorance mighty before me upon which drawn figures alight against the stone — my own; what is mine is the wall my votes and non-votes, my purchases wrapped in unthought have built and stretched, undead gray. There are no secrets in debris. I have a home I hate, its steel and lights red and blue upon me. Home itself a mist through which I pass and barely notice. Home, to assume you are home is to assume I am welcome in you — to what degree let the wounds say so — and can come and go as I please. The television tells me Over there, and one must point with a fully extended arm to show how far from, how unlike here there really is.Over there where they blow each other up over land and God. And it feels good to stretch as if from waking — this silence could be called a kind of sleep — and think beyond, where I am not and where those who are are not — wall upon which drawings of fists strike skyward and faces of activists stare into me from my Google search. Turnstiles separate home from home. Barbed wire catches clouds in its coil saws. What do I know of injustice but having a home throughout which bullets, ballots, and brutality trifecta against people who were here before here was here and people were brought here to change the landscape of humanity? That word has rolling hills and towering walls. To hammer against it not to get to the other side — believe nothing is there — but to make obsolete side— know there is nothing. I know this: my metaphors have small arms, my wallet has made monstrous my reflection, I have done terrible things by being alive. I have built a wonder of terror with my life. • [Image of an eight-meter-tall wall, constructed by connected prefabrications. Interspersed among them are surveillances (I’ll make them pay). What is closed opens then settles. Spill: a scream, what makes it. On the wall a body leans, which is a caption: “This is not prayer.” (Which side are you on?) Here where there is no here, endurance measured by a field’s disruption and around it what makes possible a furthering (to settle this in court or to settle in this courtyard). Argument: this thinking is real because it has been made touchable if touch is the mutual rejection of objects from entering into the other (let’s settle this once and for all) who’s going to pay for what reaches toward and fails at heaven? To settle the debt, settle in silence. If it is not silent (this roaring (is it fire / stone / a pen lifting (ban no ban no b — ) or falling?) is it home?) make it so.] • Between his war with self and the war in a sand-sealed country neither of us could spell, juvie took from R what little childhood Chicago hadn’t taken. Between bloody showers and rushed meals, him forced by bigger boys until pain became expectation and expectation pleasure. A shortened sentence meant fighting for a country against people for whom R held no hatred while hating the ones he fought for. There is venom in coercion misnamed loyalty. Boys and bloody water in his head when he left to fight in heat and camo. Then in the barrack’s shower, three soldiers raped R. Sand is the Plaza of Pardon. Wind draws its name across the grains and leaves the grains with the name it gave. Who would I be after so many tried to live in me forcibly? R in the desert, our Skype lost connection when an explosion blew out what little service he had.Oh shit, we been hit. Then blackout silence and my pulse explicit. Let us rejoice in this: war is a love song that makes your body dangerous to others, that makes you unlivable. You become more private. You are always early to yourself. When I saw him again, marijuana discharged him dishonorably and the men inside him shooting guns and shooting cum went with him. This is one veteran’s legacy, one man I know and have lost to distance, my own pulling me from everything I’m meant to hold close. What do I know of exile but self-imposed self-removal. When R kissed my forehead goodbye the first time I felt citizenly, patriotic, my white handkerchief au revoir-ing a friend from my mind who returned with sand hissing down his pant legs. A hero is an hourglass. For what does his countdown drop its grains, skull to heel? • One night, words came, swift as if prayed for, showing myself to me to correct myself: Grief unhides beneath bombed mosques while the sky blows into pale blue absence dust and vaporized skin. Grief and sky, unrequited lovers. Whose hurt could hold the other’s? Grief knows the passage of the worm and the temperatures of dirt. Sky knows the neon of kite sail and tail. Fifteen thousand names written in the air by ribbon, rhombi billowed into shields, glide into the Guinness Book of Records , memories passed page to page across oceans and treaties in ink out-blacking smoke. Waves leave soft creases on the Gaza Strip and know airborne diamonds by the shadows of their measured shapes tethered like falcons to a child’s quick hands ... How to mistake American arrogance for love, to think kites could humanize the already-human and hide the anti-human from its history. Why cloak our custom of cloaking? To make palatable the blade we turn on ourselves we turn it on others. In good light the metal will give us back to ourselves. Does the wolf know it has a reflection? Ask the water if it shows to us its beast self or has one given to it. • [Image of an eight-meter-tall wall, over which is painted “Is you coming or going or is I?” A ray of light ballistic through the form is both answer and rejection of an answer’s possibility.] • Tragedy disturbs tragedy. There can never be just one way to see the end to ourselves. The Mediterranean has endless room where capsized boats of hundreds bloomed once with refugees. Water can’t be trusted. The wind with its countless hands hasting water into waves can’t be seen so can’t be trusted even though we feel it, even when we know along its unseen force bobs curt hymns from the dead to the living. We don’t hear them rising from the salt like fins. We hear bombs and think Each storm carries the broken criesof a broken nation in its contortion. Alibi for the living is the land: it’s the earth itself that refuses the dead a home in burr or field, in the stone plateaus or tableaux of scree from a city of wild boars and roads that lead to a burning garden, a gutted church, a school uniform hemmed by soldiers, a birch limned with blood and pointing dually west to a row of houses roofless but for crows and east to a rifle hung above a threshold like a saint. Something’s always watching, well-aimed and unkind, empty and on fire or just- finished burning. And the water will rust the skin, will extinguish the fire and the flesh. Baptism is what the living do. The rest are left to idols of fish and worm, are left with the living’s pens and books bereft and intricate as mausolea woven from husks of stories the dead cannot tell. They brux in our renditions as we cull their truth for our song. • The wilderness within us creeps closer to the surface of thought and burial. We drag ourselves from the selves that laid bear traps that trapped us into our own dragging, one leg limp behind like a memory pain brings forward. Low grass collects pockets of our blood as if any gloss could reduce droughts in the smallest needs. If we make eye contact with the most beleaguered of us, we pray the remains of god would shower spears to smite clean such embarrassment. We are not neighbors, just near. We are failures of nature and the stars burn down through trees no light we can trust. Because we were shrewd with conviction the pads of our right hands’ digits have singed into them one letter each to spell faith. What we touch with that hand will fell our enemies who are ourselves. We draw a maze with our blood, follow paths drawn from the cruelties sculpted into another’s body. I am losted by a child’s missing eye, dead-ended by a family encrusted with shrapnel. If I follow my own disaster more closely, if I allow buzzards spiraling above prophecy enough to reveal time as caught in the loop of their pinions, if I remove my shirt from my bloodied torso and twist from it my own oil, if in my pocket I find the final ballot before the mine was tripped in god’s patience, if I see my vote had predicted the immolation of seasons and the beheading of goats sacrificed to rain that washed away no blood and emulsified sickness into the oceans and seas, if pain rises from the mouths of the dead in the shape the dead took when alive, if all this time we’ve been building tombs and calling them home — • [Image of an eight-meter-tall wall bearing a hole in its center, or a 1.7272-meter-tall wall, which is me, bearing a hole in my center. I am the wall and the hole is what makes me better. I want to be better.] • Hajjar, does a body on its back act as the body’s own grief? Is a body downed the mind’s shadow? If we must love our souls, does that mean we must love what leaves?

O darling, the moon did not disrobe you. You fell asleep that way, nude and capsized by our wine, our Bump ‘n’ Grind shenanigans. Blame it on whatever you like; my bed welcomes whomever you decide to be: thug- mistress, poinsettia, John Doe in the alcove of my dreams. You can quote verbatim an entire album of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony with your ass in the air. There’s nothing wrong with that. They mince syllables as you call me yours. You don’t like me but still invite me to your home when your homies aren’t near enough to hear us crash into each other like hours. Some men have killed their lovers because they loved them so much in secret that the secret kept coming out: wife gouging her husband with suspicion, churches sneering when an usher enters. Never mind that. The sickle moon turns the sky into a man’s mouth slapped sideways to keep him from spilling what no one would understand: you call me God when it gets good though I do not exist to you outside this room. Be yourself or no one else here. Your do-rag is camouflage-patterned and stuffed into my mouth.