Magnolia Hill Road
by Derek JG Williams
My Grandfather used to say
if there are rocks
you might as well throw them.
It’s the fate of glass to be broken.
Spider-webbing impact
spiraling out from an exact
crushed-in center.
My Grandfather never said that.
I come from a long line
of porch-sitters, storytellers
rattling myths ripened
by wanderlust.
With steady gun-oil hands
he’d light a Chesterfield.
We’d watch the sighing evening,
the settling sun.
Those nights the moon
was so full of mischief.
Ripe with rowdy possibility,
it rose, a dimwit out over the hills.
I was old enough to know
when not to speak.
Derek JG Williams puts words into rows both long and short. His writing has been featured at venues throughout the country and been published both in print and on the web. He is a recent runner up for Knockout Literary Journal‘s Reginald Shepherd Poetry Prize and the Bellingham Review has nominated him for the 2013 Best New Poet’s Anthology. His writing is published or forthcoming in Main Street Rag, RHINO, Bellingham Review, Knockout, Palooka Literary Journal, White Whale Review, Amethyst Arsenic, and Union Station Magazine. He’s a proponent of handclaps in songs and needs no excuse to celebrate all the time, anytime.