PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS

Cascade


For all the fatherless children, the lake’s bottom.

For all the children butchered by abandonment

make them somnambulists in heatless nights. 

Give a sleepwalking boy a lyre of smoke and a score 

he can’t read. Rest, I tell my legs as they march

to the tune of a night terror toward the black 

wet’s call. I’ll go in as flesh and come out 

as water falling from the bowl of a pelican’s beak.

 

97   The Paris-American

Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, Illinois native. He is the author of the  chapbooks Bruised Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc. 2011) and
Burn (YesYes Books, 2013). He is a Cave Canem graduate and has received work-study scholarships from Bread Loaf. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review Online, Callaloo, The Southern Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sou’wester, West Branch, Blackbird and others. Phillip is  currently a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis and is working on his MFA in Creative Writing. He is the poetry editor of the online journal Vinyl Poetry.

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 Lyn Lifshin