Sunday rolls in like a delivery truck
Quietly dropping off expected thoughts:
Monday’s stress arrives early again.
No returns. I collect a cricket’s song,
Filling up my house with his complaints.
The smell of rain approaching dances through
My open window as the neighbors’ talk
Tangles in shrubs and fence beyond the dark.
I hold him close to the screen, its tear. He sings.


Joshua Eric Williams is from Carrollton, GA. He graduated with an MFA in Poetry from Western Colorado University in August of this year. His poetry has appeared in Measure, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, E-Verse, 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, and his collection, The Strangest Conversation (Red Moon Press, 2019), receiving an honorable mention in the Haiku Society of America’s 2020 Merit Book Awards.