Outbuilding

We’ve got too many self-
monuments: our towns of sheds
and storage units, the private shrines
we call our closets. Their usefulness
is emptiness. Every cabinet,
drawer, and pocket warehouses
pasts none of us visit enough
to know we have too much.
We’ve forgotten how to forget.

*

Joshua Eric Williams graduated with an MFA in Poetry and an M.A. in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University. His poetry has appeared in Measure, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Sonic Boom, Rattle, and many other print and online journals. In 2014, he won the Eclectic Poetry Prize. His recent honors include: the selection of his poem “Barriers” for publication in an anthology of pandemic writing, The Great Isolation, his collection, The Strangest Conversation (Red Moon Press, 2019), receiving an honorable mention in the Haiku Society of America’s 2020 Merit Book Awards, Rattle Magazine nominating his poem “haiku” for a 2022 Pushcart Prize, and The Haiku Foundation featuring his haiga for the month of March this year.