Five Poems
Adam Day
Blurred Boundaries
Water bottles
haywire dance
rubber bullet song.
Hip on hip,
territory arrangement.
Nurse hands slipping
through the dark.
Roped rain
light, and masks
like a cupboard
holding a lost
generation.
Overflow
Judges – spit
no polish; wigs
out of order –
clouds hanging
like wool
on barbed wire.
History rush
loosens jaws
white system
reality rewritten
in cities that are
also history.
The Present Fire
Men stuck home;
house secrets
split mother’s face
stitched up. Blind
dunes abandoned
camp. Late light
and lost glasses.
Outside, trees
walking, like human
walking. Her mind
calculating how to steal
life as hers has been stolen.
Sky Closing
Chunk blown out
the levy, making
several centuries
simultaneously present
where bones
undrown themselves
and live oaks
creak toward spring.
Resistance and Play
On the corner
selling water;
fluctuating prices .
Nonsite. Blurred
boundaries attuned
to what it might mean
to live rubble.
Ongoingness
like pulling a drop
from the river.
Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020) and Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books) and is 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. His work has appeared in the APR, Boston Review, e·ratio 27, Volt, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He is the publisher of Action, Spectacle.