Hunter
When you were mine though not
mine at all permanently, just a body borrowed
without permission, a body interrupted,
interruptive—
the sky opened like a secret in a mouth
mouth with a word in it
word with an arrowhead in its flank: Love, small
creature it was
crying in the night beneath me
Copyright © 2016 by Phillip B. Williams. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 2, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I wanted to write a short poem after having worked on a fourteen-page poem for quite some time. In some way killing or at least wounding love, with the v being the arrowhead, seemed like an appropriate way to move on with my life.”
—Phillip B. Williams
Phillip B. Williams
Phillip B. Williams is the author of Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016).