Overdue
A screaming world says
my body will always be a drain
I pierce a river and the day cracks
snow falls
on the windshield of the Chevrolet
my mother’s hair
I start the warning
from her warm belly I break
her water her watch
dangles from her tiny wrist
my father starts the car with a camera around his neck
inside I’m a little bud heating ice against my temples
a bone breaks as I move upward I’m turned then spent
mother pushes father snaps
I wasn’t just a boy I was a bill—
I am Lifted From the Loudest Part
The day opens
This golden bell
Two birds on a vessel
My neighbor sings in their kitchen
I am lifted from the loudest part
There is a place where I have kept secrets
Its micro-furs its soft skin
A forest of virtuous hairs
This quiet patch a breezeway
I am lifted from the loudest part
It hurts too much to bloom
This mighty cold chamber
This labor of risk this gateway
This shade this soil this dark cloud
I am lifted from the loudest part
I arrived alone
I admitted I am a body that wants
A horn is blowing out into the street
Like a prayer a poem rearranges
I am lifted from the loudest part
Come softly and gently put your light there
Show me how to move across this body
Hover there, hold me
Witness the way I bend as
I am lifted from the loudest part
The Meteorite is the Source of the Light But the Meteor is Just What we See
I like to lay beside you
as the world burns.
Is there a record you’d
like to hear?
When I was a child,
alone
looking up,
always at faces
yelling,
a battle between two heroes, humiliated.
I would build a home inside
that violence &
what then did I become?
A wall to climb over
to see green on the other side.
The doo wop, the dancing
golden summers,
fruit squishing through
my small hands.
I ate food
that had fallen
on soft wet grass.
I spent years
coasting this way.
I will stop at nothing
to feel
a soft breeze
on my shoulders,
my stomach when I sit down
your back
a billowing curtain.
This & more I am
grateful:
the sky
forgiveness &
the song you picked,
an arrow sent from dark space.
A 2019 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, Dare Williams is a Queer HIV-positive poet, artist, rooted in Southern California. He has received fellowships from John Ashbury Home School and The Frost Place. He is a co-producer of the reading series Word of Mouth which raises money for communities facing food and nutrition inequities. Dare’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a two-time finalist for Blood Orange Review’s contest. His work has been anthologized in Redshift 5 by Arroyo Secco press and is featured in Cultural Weekly, Bending Genres, THRUSH, Exposition Review, and is forthcoming in Limp Wrist and elsewhere.