Thief in the Interior

Phillip B. Williams

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781938584312
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"This gorgeous debut is a 'debut' in chronology only.... Need is everywhere—in the unforgiving images, in lines so delicate they seem to break apart in the hands, and in the reader who will enter these poems and never want to leave."—Adrian Matejka

Phillip B. Williams investigates the dangers of desire, balancing narratives of addiction, murders, and hate crimes with passionate, uncompromising depth. Formal poems entrenched in urban landscapes crack open dialogues of racism and homophobia rampant in our culture. Multitudinous voices explore one's ability to harm and be harmed, which uniquely juxtaposes the capacity to revel in both experiences.

From "Agenda":

I.

While two women kissed in their house I watched
a jury hide bullets in a Black boy's body, all rigor mortis
and bass line. I landed in Chicago, a lead box.

The airport showed CNN and a Black mother
could not be heard over gate changes, bistro jazz.
Subtitles gathered and faded like gossip

while I made my mouth vacant in my hometown.
I carried a fever of insufferable noise that skin,
illuminated by a hoodie, held close, a forced kin.

Phillip B. Williams has authored two chapbooks: Bruised Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc.) and Burn (YesYes Books). A Cave Canem graduate, he received scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. His work appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Poetry, the Southern Review, West Branch, and others. Phillip received his MFA in Writing as a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow at the Washington University in St. Louis. He is the poetry editor of Vinyl Poetry.

I

BOUND

Wasn’t night what lingered where sweat left

salt, where breath touch-expired? No.

I didn’t 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.

BLACK WITCH MOTH

The moth lifts its dress and everything beneath

its hem’s shadow sings—the 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 bull’s genitals

have rotted and dropped their bells. The moth

slips through gnat-swarmed air onto the bull’s hooves

and flies past the bull’s corpse, beyond the outskirts

of the barnyard. No dust from the moth’s pleats—

opening and closing—drops onto the dead

animal’s 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 boy’s 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.

IGNIS FATUUS

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 that

have failed to guide us; now imitate everything

beneath the stars.

But who is he? Phantom, filament at its brightest...