Poetry Published by San Antonio Review

"It’s hard to be a city at night, sleeping along this big river. So much wakes you from slumber ... "

"for the 13th time i’ve looked at the time / glowing back from the phone that never sleeps"

"Our fossilized love, embedded in strata"

"it doesn't seem to belong here"

"prairie's not a woman after all"

"This fall we'll offer nothing for the harvest"

"I wanted to hide forever from the world"

"behold the candle of the soul"

"Belief is to live"

"become well-lit"

"fallen branches"

"serenading gondoliers"

"secrets revealed"

A poem for the people.

"words emerge and brush me around"

"slippery with sighs"

"What am I without the next cloth of you"

"This is our last dance"

A poem from musician-poet Harold Whit Williams' latest collection.

"myopia of myths"

"I put no faith in stilettos or glass ceilings"

"the world today's a dangerous place"

"hides its true age like a fan dance"

"you felt hibiscus tall"

"Heavy-handed strokes / Punctuate this piece."

"you will still spend your breath to complete your poem"

“Pencils down now, please,” / Armed men politely order. / "There shall be no press.”

"It matters not to me, as I assume / Some gods cannot exist except in dreams, / In trifling songs."

“The lighthouse is a century old; / I only ask for half of that time.”

"Maybe thanks / For separating thoughts from what one thinks."

"Stop in on Pluto, since no one ever calls anymore"

“hair trimmed in reeds instead of ribbons”

"Saltwater jerks & spits"

"Byzantium is but the shadow of a whisper"

"I have forecasted my future / happiness"

“I know you’re reading the inverse print of the carbon paper”

“the old and young laborers who never knew a train ride, / never knew you could go elsewhere, be someone else.”

“yet navigating by the heart / is a tricky business”

“She taught a lesson no one wants to learn.”

"settlers without blueprints"

“On an arc of bending bladed metal, bowed”

A Meditation on a Translation Work-in-Progress

"pyrrhic freedoms fade softly / into heat of noon sweat"

"A material so imbued with history / cannot be a blank slate."

"the dead starve in their hollow / halls"

"maintenance / compassion / nurture."

"Can I survive the very light I created"

"Later / tonight, a baby will be put into my body by an act of love"

"You know from the floorboards that you are / in a forgotten city."

“I sometimes think / That any given 2 people/ As 2 Euclidean points / Define a line”

"I like games and fun and play and I like talking about how easy poetry is, how everyone is a poet, how the alphabet is a playground and we are the players."

“newton said that energy is neither / created nor destroyed”

“the waiting — the looking — and yearning”

"fever-dream / of the Un-united States"

"Craftsmen lay out their hand-made dolls wearing ancient emperors’ robes and hats."

"side to side like strangers"

“The first blueberry pings the pail’s / emptiness”

"a barn collapsed / in a spiral of timbers and twisted roof"

“Take. Take. Take.”

"i'm not granite / but a / breakable innocent"

"I dreamt I was the ashes of / Christ"

"Our East Anglian-Indian summer bounced in place"

“We're having a baby soon. / Despite being two men.”

"Now I know to call / this a panic attack."

“and we drank the silk milk of her voice / watched her body thin on prime-time Saturday night”

“I puked my prayers / sweated in tangled sheets”

"our escape velocity wasn’t enough / to leave Ohio behind forever."

"I never should have happened"

“I cannot hold the light for her”

“the rain dolls sway with beads of glint / in their matte eyes”

"Our mothers were jeweled / in nose pins and brass hoops"

“tear with shrapnel hands / eyelashes from their skin graves”

"when the last train came through i missed it / i was in the bathroom trying to zip up my sanity"

"The wind is looking for his foggy keys / to sneak through the door."

“My bread’s in need of / blessing; salt the theft.”

"Though we dream of dying at our curtain, / most are carried off mid-speech / or awaiting cue"

"it's 7 / a.m. on this fine / sunday morning"

"I live atop a smoldering volcano, / always rumbling and threatening to erupt."

"She dreams of me in matte"

"I counted twelve hundred drops of rain / to cull the drought in the desert"

“And there we stood / looking out in silence / at the great river / too wide to swim across”

"These fopdoodles don’t know diddly-squat."

"You will not forget what you were made for, / And you will not ever give up the fight."

"I dream of your dance with warm nectar / and the frosted hummingbirds buzzing by."

"We keep our distance"

"And you journey here in couples or groups, / intent on wading out into my waters"

"One crooked alley morphs silhouettes into drain pipes with / Night, the magician, molding frames"

"Boy, you can talk."

"i’m not deceivedby the brilliance of fall"

"The trees heard and watched / until I had to be dragged away."

"Last semester, a student with Asperger’s announced / to our class that yes, Frank O’Hara was right"

I stand by the window / watching this half-hearted quarantine.

-- overheard in an audience

"And each time I’m reminded of my age / and that this is how it will be."

"does more than look"

“Dreaming of something and not fully understanding that which / compels us to keep moving on.

“What if we felt everything / while walking & / it was all worth it?”

"In my son’s wide eyes I can see / the steeple of the church we left / after one too many dirty looks

“You were packed off, steered / In the direction of your mother’s desires.”