CHRONICLE
by CONSTANT LAVAL WILLIAMS
Saliva beading off fangs like diamonds today.
A drunk blacking-in mid-bite of birthday cake.
The sunglasses I was searching for
were on my face. Joy to growing
saplings from acorns to remove even a hangnail
of carbon from the atmosphere.
Joy to astonishing and brief moments
of love, love like a Maraschino cherry
resting on the navel of a medical cadaver.
No more flirtations with death—I’m betrothed
to the iconic polycule of chocolate,
coffee and cigarettes. The light
that I cling to like an iPhone
at a cocktail party, the rising light
held in a bottle of canary-diamond-yellow
piss and Mountain Dew on the highway shoulder.
The sunrise only makes me a survivor today.
This feeling only makes me extra human.
And have you ever closed your eyes
on the metro and listened
to the sound of your entire life
passing through you?
When I signed the contract with God
to not eviscerate myself, I didn’t
read the fine print about living
past the age of twenty-five.
I’m helpless without the manual.
I’m not comfortable with the process.
Joy to discomfort too—
removing an eyelash from the face
of a stranger. Joy to all the strangers
I’ll never see again—the barista
in Payson, Utah, the mailman
on the street corner crying
to the opera singer, the human fibers
in the tapestry. I’m beholden
to the game of Tetris played with umbrellas
on a narrow sidewalk in the rain.
I’m so tired of licking headstones.
I imagined the body
as a shimmering halfway house.
In this limbo everything is happening now.
In the salon window, candy-green acrylic nails
on the severed beauty of a silicone hand.
Constant Laval Williams is the author of Elegy with Beautiful Child which was chosen as the winner of Copper Nickel’s 2025-2026 Jake Adam York Prize, judged by Patricia Smith and forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2027. He earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California, where he received the Beau J. Boudreaux Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, Copper Nickel, Lana Turner, and Blackbird, among others. Though he is first and foremost a poet, he is also a polymathic creative, releasing and performing darkwave music under the name Casket Cassette, and documenting subculture and visual melancholy through analog photography. He is from Los Angeles.
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