You Don’t Have to Believe in the World
poems, William Erickson
April Gloaming, 2024
I belonged, once, and was given brief belongings. One such belonging may have been William Erickson’s deeply invented work You Don’t Have to Believe in the World. Repetition here is a woven fragility that loosens only at the tenured etiquette of delicacy. Erickson’s verse is both placeholder and future claim, and contains the letting go that is a roof and then a window and then a mirror with a stomach of rain. Shake every umbrella. Double every ghosted ghost and photograph that which wants a soul. I get drunk and read and don’t get drunk and write. I can do neither. I can do both. Work like this sobers me inward. Is a magic show for the disappeared. If brevity is a borrowed faith that only suffers those who return it changed, then Erickson’s poems coin their take with a madly measured giving.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
kingsoftrain 
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