John Sibley Williams

The Peaches

It’s not that I love them
you said

bruised overripe                      all the sweetness
bled out turning           pulp in the high grass  under

a relentless summer sun
us boys took                to mean an eden

ready for ruin       that we’d ruin the moment our
parents looked away (lost       in their own lost

paradises) no
the story I prefer         you told me that night

our neighbor’s daughter didn’t come home    is
that nectar the bees have worked over tastes

too bitter to not take                into my mouth
(like a man for once)   & own

the way we’ll never own anything
pure again

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John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. A twenty-three-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Laux/Millar Prize, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and others. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a poetry editor and literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, North American Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.