Signing
At the Edges
The Moment
Untying the Knot
The Outside
The wind
does not talk
among the stones
or precinct shell,
rocks rolled
in the mouth, world
as will. There’s
nothing hiding
in the branches.
Cherry blossoms
are here
and gone.
When the river
holds you down
you’re supposed to drown,
right? Use value
and the laboring body;
a we becoming
by radically negating
what others have done
to bodies again. Again.
But the invisible
find a way, asking
how people might give.
I give you head
before you head
to therapy. A bodily
way of knowing
wind twisting
the shadows
of falling leaves.
Wheeze of cicadas
and stoneflies
lynching the confederate
statue with yellow ribbon –
quicksand eyes;
palms of blood,
its mouth
thinking backward
in the light cast
by car shadow.
In the blue honey
dusk a winged
thing fell, good
and legal, beach
Republican like
an animal carried
in a handbag, amid
tranquilized trashcan
children, between
two suburban
train stations.
Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020), and of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Award. He is the editor of the forthcoming anthology, Divine Orphans of the Poetic Project, from 1913 Press, and his work has appeared in the APR, Boston Review, The Progressive, Volt, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He is the publisher of Action, Spectacle.
