KOREY WILLIAMS

Sfumato

after Carl Phillips

From dusk of dawn to dawn of dusk,  wind drifts on water—air for water to break into, you breaking

into water.  But to say  you’re all  one is not  to say  you’re  indistinguishable,  only  beholden to one

another.  Water takes to the earth that holds it,  though it,  too,  acts on earth.  But what I think I see

and what I think I ought to see are somehow beyond logic, as when what’s there and what’s known

seem no longer the point. Or how, breaking into air, water is to itself a distortion like any other: light

through skin, through water, bending until bending is the only life it’s come to.

Korey Williams grew up in suburban Chicago and studied at Illinois Wesleyan University, the University of Oxford, and Cornell University. Williams was a finalist in the 2017 National Poetry Series and his work appears in Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, Fogged Clarity, Winter Tangerine, The Offing, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. Williams is currently a doctoral student at the University of Chicago.