Amelia L. Williams
Charlottesville Anniversary
One Year After August 12, 2017
Dark torrents of rain make mist on the mountains
swirl like cobwebs I catch with my broom.
August air's thick—a damp woolen passage
for muck that oozed from soil near my home.
Mars has come close, its blood-orange gleam
hangs three fists up in a darkening sky. Mold
blooms on leather chairs, silverfish scuttle,
a Hebrew moth comes to my outside light—
its black loops on white a powdery sigh.
Along this dirt road past the old country store,
roots of the hanging-tree, scar tissue exhumed—
of all that's exposed, what part is mine?
Bio
Amelia L. Williams, PhD, a medical writer, hiker, and amateur naturalist, lives in central Virginia. Her #NoPipelines poetry/art installations have included "LandEscapes," "Triage," "Spooked," and "Soundings." Williams coordinated "The Ties That Bind: A #NoPipelines Collaborative Art and Story Project" of over 250 fabric braids made by impacted citizens to protest proposed fracked-gas pipelines in Virginia. Sales of her chapbook "Walking Wildwood Trail: Poems and Photographs" (Wild Ink Press, 2016) benefit regional environmental organizations. Her full length collection was a finalist for the 2022 Wandering Aengus Press Book Award. Twice a Pushcart nominee, she served as Assistant Editor with OneEarthSangha.org, and earned a residency at the Hambidge Center. Her poems and hybrids have appeared in Shot Glass Journal, TAB, Streetlight Magazine, The Healing Muse, The Hollins Critic, ANMLY, Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry, Nimrod International Journal; Present Tense Lit Mag, K'in, The Hopper, Poetry South, and elsewhere.