"Transcontinental" by John Sibley Williams

That someone made this their home:

glint of blade, peeled back
skin, all the pigs but one growing restless
because no one’s taught them terrified
or necessity or how to keep a whole town
fed

& in the eyes of the dead blowflies nurture their young without lesson

or history book, just the world’s exquisite grammar

that comes with the territory of shutting up & living, neither
beautiful nor ugly, just the keep-on

of steel tracks cutting fields into properties, all of which we’ll own someday;

the small hands of sunflowers, their windless sway,
warming metal,
a new generation on its way to burn & build,
the bray of another train making windows in the air.

John Sibley Williams is the author of five collections, most recently As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize, forthcoming 2020). A twenty-three-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a poetry editor and literary agent.