as we find a way to wipe your armpitwithout lifting your arm up and away you say, you’ve never seen me so (I forgetthe word you use and replace it with close as in, we’ve never been so close) and I sayI was thinking that—it’s because, you say I didn’t want you near what wasn’t […]
Condition of Fire is a film by Alastair Cook based on seven poems from poet J.L. Williams’ debut collection.
Tha obair cealla na chùis-iongnaidh,
gràsan Dhè gun stad a’ taomadh;
bheir sinn ùmhlachd dhan a’ chealla,
tha làn de mhìorbhailean matha.
Smaller than you imagined.
More like your idea of a dog’s.
You cup it softly. Your thumb fidgets
over the fissure of a temporal lobe.
sometimes what I’d love
is to put an end to poems
Folded card work
I lost my shoes on Rachel St.
/ Head lolled back to rest
/ against a pillow of the Mont
/ kiss the foot of the…
My sisters, the time has come
/ to let your hair grow long and wild and grey,
/ to cast away the heated rollers…
for my son
/
/ O my heart is the unlucky heir of the ages
/ And my body is unwillingly the secret agent
/ Of my…
I dock the dead, the damaged and diseased;
/ the gnarled and dry come tumbling from the heights
/ until I stand knee-deep…
I join the usual coven in the pool, ladies past
a certain age, warming up their tonsils.
I have, I think, most organs that
/ I started with. Some shaped by time
/ foreshortened, elongated, dulled.
/ I keep at bay…
