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William Orem’s first collection of stories, Zombi, You My Love, won the GLCA New Writers Award, formerly given to Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, Richard Ford and Alice Munro. His second collection, Across the River, won the Texas Review Novella Prize. His first novel, Killer of Crying Deer, won the Eric Hoffer Award and has been optioned for film. His first collection of poems, Our Purpose in Speaking, won the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize and was published by MSU Press. It also won the Rubery International Book Award in poetry and was chosen Book of the Year. His second novel, Miss Lucy, won the Gival Press Novel Award; Kirkus listed it as one of the Best Books of 2019. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, in poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. Meanwhile, his short plays have been performed internationally, winning both the Critics’ Prize and Audience Favorite Award at Durango Theatre Fest, and thrice being nominated for the prestigious Heideman Award at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Currently he is a Senior Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College. Details at williamorem.com.

Night in a day (poem for my father)

William Orem

On overcast days you can see bats flying;
          they think it’s night again.
So I crunched my eyes against the marble-colored air
and the still, metrical
          divisions of pine.

The sky was gently veined. That autumn

was late in beginning, a trickle of warmth run through
into November. You shook your waxcoat free
          of clinging burs;
we walk for hours

in this dream. I suppose

in truth, you were at the office where you worked,
and I was at the house,
often on my bed,
sometimes in the empty yard, sometimes
miles and miles away, waiting

only for those messengers—

eager to catch
the tumbling hands,
           those dark shapes vaulting crookedly home.

Sonnet: The Paulist Brothers of Boston

It seems they haven’t heard that Saul,
from dreams, invented Yahweh’s Son
(not some Yeshua, whom he never saw
alive), along with claims to prophecy,
communiqués, his visionary tales,
the nighttime thief

who sent him on those waterways:
a basket drop, the barter with Athenians,
a Latin cell. But truthfully, so do we all—
invent our Christs, I mean—
alone at twelve and listening to the staircase speak,
or moonlight fill the hall:

my God, my God, the little brothers pray
have mercy on your servant, lest he die—

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