Williams - Thief in the Interior

N OTE TO THE R EADER Alice James Books encourages you to calibrate your e-reader device settings using the line of characters below as a guide, which optimizes the line length and character size: stretched across snow to feel some sensation. He stretches his collection before him Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible. Doing this will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accomodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems may be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the line break will be marked with a shallow indent. Table of Contents I B OUND Wasnt night what lingered where sweat left salt, where breath touch-expired? No.

I didnt find stars or the moon in my hair, or grass, or the first traces of dew that I am told cannot compete with a woman pleasured, that I could get her that way and should try to, should want to try Was a vastness over me like a great system of clouds pursuing each other, colliding into one another like fists that bloomed like devotions like Can I be only one thing at once? I was told to believe in and became that single vessel beneath which water I would never taste moved. I was shut tight. I was going somewhere and quickly. Little boat. Little boat made smaller by distance. B LACK W ITCH M OTH The moth lifts its dress and everything beneath its hems shadow singsthe grasses where lie the dead bull and flies skating across its still open eyes, its mouth crusted over with clover and spit while the maggots swim their patient circuits where the bulls genitals have rotted and dropped their bells.

The moth slips through gnat-swarmed air onto the bulls hooves and flies past the bulls corpse, beyond the outskirts of the barnyard. No dust from the moths pleats opening and closingdrops onto the dead animals choir. A boy sees its black dress bob above him, sees in its shadow an angel to call his own. Let a sudden finish overcome him wherever the wild shadow lies flat its news, lies motionless its wingdom among the barnyard grass. Let the earth take in the boy as it will the bull. And the worm-work done unto him as unto the bull.

His color gone and bone given into an end making permanent the final pose of his suffering, crux into crux his body returning into itself as though into the first cell that split until skin, until marrow, until muscle, until the maggot is king over body. Let the boys skin be a tearing, to see it torn from him and wonder how then wonder how far until the next time, the next boy. The moth flashes open its dress then not, flash then not, flaps over the dead boy, its shadow moving up his thigh to the hip, to the torso, lifting its garment across his nakedness. And the bull into the earth. And the boy into the earth. And the earth not full, the earth not full.

I GNIS F ATUUS He is one of many points of light that seem, at first, distant enough to lead me away from my loneliness and toward the flourish-stillness-flourish of the heart when told, Imitate the varied stars thathave failed to guide us; now imitate everythingbeneath the stars. But who is he? Phantom, filament at its brightest before blowing out, pattern made pattern because it was broken like a heart can never be, but say it anyway? None of those. Deceit had a simpler face: violet all around, every hemisphere familiar until turned. The stars and what lied beneath them have fled, spectral. What little light poked through the branches has led you here. Lie down. Ive tried to be kind to you by keeping the sharpest instrument to myself.

F IRST W ORDS A storm and so a gift. Its swift approach lifts gravel from the road. A fence is flattened in the course of the storms worse attempt at language thunders 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 stags horns or smooth as a single pane smashed into smaller panes that he sticks his hand inside to make blood web across his acheless skin flexing like fish gills O-lipped for a scream they cannot make.

He wants to feel what his friends have felt, the slant of fear on their faces he could never recreate, his body born without pain. When his skins pouting welts dont 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 boys first word for pain is the lights new word for home. T HEN AS P ROOF THE L AND Because when I write tree I mean fire of autumn. I mean wind moves through the failing leaves like a man the hue of bark, chased into that height, into god-hood, which is a silence. Every cypress stakes its claim in what could be called idyll, making a fetish of the land. I am the question.

Branches answer, It would be our pleasure, then, as proof, nod closer. I NHERITANCE : S PINNING N OOSE C LEARS I TS T HROAT

V ISION IN W HICH THE F INAL B LACKBIRD D ISAPPEARS A monstrosity in the alley. A many-bodied movement grouped for terror, their flights brief shadows on the kitchen curtains, on the streets 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 bodywet 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. I NHERITANCE : T HE F ORCE OF A PERTURE Accused Killers Had 3-Way Sex On Black Corpses?BlackAmericaWeb.com (2-18-13) Three Negroes lynched at Duluth, Minn. for rape. for rape.

Oct, 1919 by mpsetching on photo postcard of the lynching Fascinated, spooked into desire, the jarring appetites of the living. Some men soak black skin in fiction and knock stories back like a shotgunned body. Impartial, the ground, trees, and rivers hold artifacts of flesh impaired by those demanding privilege, their wild aesthetics. Black bodies and their high aesthetic value: teeth, toes, and severed penises in jars strangely priced. A post card, violent mail, shows the photo of three men lynched in Minnesota. Study these bodies, these leather-bound books backto back, like a good pupil,