Williams is co-editor of fiction at 3:AM magazine and assists the independent publishers Copy Press. Her work has appeared in the journals Ambit, Night & Day, The Dial and Structo and anthologised in Kakania, edited by Steven Fowler. In 2005, she was awarded the Christopher Tower Poetry Prize and her writing has been shortlisted twice in The White Review’s Short Story Prize. She teaches both creative writing and children’s literature at Royal Holloway, University of London where she was also recently awarded her doctorate. She runs a platform for new prose-poetry at the online journal Jungftak, and has a collection of short stories forthcoming from Influx Press.
With Hands on Wheels
We tug along the cats’ eyes, thinking of you.
Below us the roadkill is a pheasant rainbowfaced, and the radio and I
Are spaniel tenors, just bawlin’, darlin’:
Sit in on our traffic jamming.
We’ll sing you the hairpins, and the zebras, and the bottlenecks.
Crested beauties, breasted cuties; yeah, I’m-a gonna do that all day ‘til you roll those pretty amber eyes right out.
To think: all these pedestrians are allowed faces, but none of them are yours!
We got you all atomised, my piñata: we always drive singing from you,
But also, somehow, always, to you.
(Kerb that thought.)
I can honestly swear, with hands on wheels, I shall think on you for miles yet.
Mindwanderlust, the radio and I;
We’re just fussing with the idea of
The burst silt of the thought of the look of you in the bypass
With our hands, untentative, ten-to-two.