#william brewer

[geryone]

I Know Your Kind, William Brewer

[weusedtobegiants]

the slaying of kings, when the fallen crown is passed around the longhouse and everyone, for a moment, is a conduit to the gods, is praised for what thrives, then blamed for the black mouths of agony and hunger, and cut down;

William Brewer, from I Know Your Kind: Poems

[wintryblight]

are there any poems that absolutely consumed you when you first read them?

hi anon! i'm sorry it's taken me a while to get to your request. i've been dealing with a lot in my personal life so this project has taken a bit of a backseat. here are some poems that really struck me right upon my first read, and below are a few more. enjoy reading, & congrats on being the 100th post!

Megan O'Rourke, "Unforced Errors" | Heidegger: “Every man is born as many men / and dies as a single one.” / The bones in us still marrowful. / The moon up there, too, an arctic sorrow.

Kaveh Akbar, "Do You Speak Persian?" | I don’t remember how to say home / in my first language, or lonely, or light. / I remember only / delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you, / and shab bekheir, goodnight.

Steve Scafidi, "For the Last American Buffalo" | Because words dazzle in the dizzy light of things / and the soul is like an animal–hunted and slow– / this buffalo walks through me every night as if I was / some kind of prairie and hunkers against the cold dark

K-Ming Chang, "Closet Space" | Here / is my lung’s list of needs: how to hold water / like a woman & not / drown.

Jack Gilbert, "By Small and Small: From Midnight to Four A.M." | I wanted / to crawl in among the machinery / and hold her in my arms

William Brewer, "Resolution" | sometimes / you have to tell yourself / you’re the first person / to look out over / the silent highway / at the abandoned billboard / lit up by the moon / and think it’s selling a new / and honest life.

[literarymedicine]

— William Brewer, from “To The Addict Who Mugged Me”, I Know Your Kind: Poems

[goreprofonde]

“That perfume of fruit rot wafting through the windows has followed me since yesterday walking through the mausoleum, plates of oranges on the floor, the air haunted with their alcohol, grief its aromatic, holy cards

taped on the placards, tell me, do you remember our conversation about how the best saints are those painted with the object of their ruin?

Simon the Zealot with the saw that split him, Lucy’s eyes on a plate, Agatha’s breasts on a platter, Bartholomew’s flayed skin draped like a raincoat over his arm.”

- William Brewer, Hagiography.

[absurdistdiathesis]

Do you hear that? All the things I meant to do are burnt spoons

hanging from the porch like chimes. Do you have some wind? Just a hit

and was the grass always this vocal? A hit and the blades start sharpening

in the sun. I wear a belt because my pants don’t fit.

My pants don’t fit because I wear the belt. I can tell you how it tastes.

Tannin. Heaven. Is it May already? As onetime owner of my own

private spring, I can say it’s overrated. Remember? Someone

found me in a coffee shop bathroom after I’d overdone it

and carried me like a feed sack to the curb. As they brought me back,

they said, the poppies on my arms bruised red petals.

They said, He’s your savior. But let’s not get carried away.

Let’s stop comparing everything to wings. Have you ever even felt

like you’re not going to die forever? It’s terrifying.

- William Brewer, Naloxone

[sunsounds]

This is what want does, this and the raindrops becoming pills in their throats, spurring wings, all that fluttering the hum of a false heaven

William Brewer, “West Virginia”

[allyourprettywords]

“In a Different Night,” John Sibley Williams

—for William Brewer

We can’t go on pretending this house has ears, that the dead give a damn the how of our remembering them, that all rainbows aren’t really light trapped between gasoline & water. Because haloes are brittle as fire, as stars we’ve stopped believing in, as hoarfrosted grass snapping off in the hundreds every step, we can’t pretend eternity will outlast us. Close & closer still: the skin of the earth opens to fascia, all living parts tied to each other tied to a structure that keeps the world from bursting. When it bursts, let’s stop saying we’ll know it. & that death means almost home, that there’s a difference between cemetery & potter’s field, that last breaths belong to the grieving as much as this thick sterile hospital air gone pungent as overwatered flowers. All of it. Let’s let it all go. As we did Santa, childhood, god, the story of that winged boy who, only after burning, discovers gravity.