Burn

Burn* Kimberly Williams (bio) On Sunday’s sermon,I cried in my change pursetucked between my legsbleached in saw dust,from fresh white pews. The last thing I remember was my hand, the faintest yellow from the skin of sickness. My left thrust in a cauldronfrom a refusal. Bits of me swelledlike pigeon peas before skinflattened to spread like dough. Game and folk stared at my hand, the inside of dog ears and coconuts. Fields even noticed and whispers flung of me sleeved in lame so I took my son and we ranacross crops, gullies and deadpassing in streams. Then, he started to run lung raw towards a rogue kite, a few miles from the moon. It flailed like a sliver of flesh stolen from a thigh. We clutched its rope—rode the kiteas my son’s chest billowedpropelling him to the moon.We rode the kite with handssweetly burnt, from the tail of fable. [End Page 245] Kimberly Williams Kimberly Williams is a poet from Ettrick, Virginia. She has been published in Gulf Coast, Drunken Boat, As Us Journal, and Philologia. She received her MFA in poetry from Cornell University, where she presently teaches in the English Department. Footnotes * after Kara Walker’s A Picture Obviously Pertaining to Escape by Any Means ... Copyright © 2014 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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