New York Presbyterian/Weill-Cornell Medical Center
Molly Williams | Poetry
One day, something happened:
I saw the sound of blood.
I was dreaming of you.
I created you.
I came out of my body and saw my body expand.
I arrived for examination
and saw my temporary living quarters:
heaven.
Immediately, everything can go wrong!
(Even your teeth! In dreams,
my teeth become soft.) I give birth
to water, near-useless
in a waterless stream.
I am glad and ashamed to drink it.
You need to know what pain is in the first place.
Then it hurts even more
when life is full of bloody miracles:
chicken bones. Raspberries. Porcelain.
The long-burning oil. Hey,
I am going to feel it
for the rest of my life. But
there are benefits in heaven:
treatment of the common cold;
a shadow cast on your face.
One day, something happened.
One day, I called you by your name.
You took me by the elbows
and you let go.
This poem was created by running a much longer poem through many languages in Google Translate, then choosing some phrases, disrupting their order, and collaging them using a different logic.
Molly Williams is a queer, mixed Black writer born and raised in northern New Jersey and based in Austin, TX. They received an MFA in fiction and poetry from the Michener Center for Writers and subsequently served as the Mari Sabusawa fellow at American Short Fiction. They are currently at work on a first novel. Molly’s work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, No Contact, Vagabond City, and elsewhere. You can find them at https://mollyvwilliams.com/.