from Midnight’s Talking Lion
and the Wedding Fire
Adam Day
Imagine not simply crime but do the mind of the killers only glimpses so we’re to fill small gaps in the act psyche to detail context, precedence amid implicit own imagined crimes. Another’s harm or “average” Bundy, Tsarnaev far from fine yet even among us capable of cause wishing or. Who has imagined? Hasn’t?
Subverts narrative codes by obeying them only insofar as no coherent story may emerge, expressing right to not make sense. If narrative continuity is a logical, normative way of ordering chaotic flux of lived experience, what happens when continuity produces effect of disjunction, when logical pathways across time, space, and situation—which emerge through traceable transfers from one storytelling subject to another—do not eventuate in closure, let alone in cohesive allegorical potency?
“Some few days after that they had refreshed themselves, went to see the city, beheld everybody of Paris so sottish, and fond by nature: a juggler, tinkling bells, fiddler in the middle of an intersection, evangelical preacher pressed so hard upon constrained rest place seeing so many about said with loud voice: ‘them will have to pay.’ Give them their wine, but only in sport. Drawing out into the open air, bitterly all-to-sprayed them, drowned. Some, nevertheless, escaped by mere speed of foot, sweating, coughing, spitting, and out of breath, began to swear and curse, hot. Paris; name formerly Leucotia, from the Greek leukotes: whiteness. The Parisians, patched up and pieces. Parisians from Greek parresia, signifies boldness, liberty in speech.
The great bells in the towers sound harmoniously meanwhile came a beggar somewhat heavy good. All the city risen up in downroar at insurrections, foreign nations, leaders of tumultuous courses. Would to God. The shop wherein are forged these divisions and factious combinations. Believe for a truth, that the place wherein the people gathered together for music, was thus sulphured, hopurymated, moiled. To signify unto him the great and horrible prejudice they sustain and notwithstanding reason. This charge given by the online orator sophister, there and they were chosen for this purpose…
Out of so few words. The texts are composed merely. Conveyance control and mirrors which these men these men (and a few women) came to story lives, or attempted to. Plenty to “understand,” but does not matter much because magnitude actions within implied by the very; which while it be comprehended, cannot truly be understood even by the themselves, at points, as when quoted saying, “I do not know why I did that. That was something, I do not know why. I do not know why it was done.”
“Islam compatible or not with values of French society” and conservative left-leaning parties; still, antisemitic acts increasing. And Palestine dissatisfaction is often. Assaults on kippah and headscarf target collective. Relation between accessory and psyche and not entirely unlike culture surrounding colonial experience: of by family members, recent ancestors of these young people. Exist mastering themselves being mastered. Past, made history now being made of us/them.
Adam Day is the author of the forthcoming collection of poetry, 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 Emerging Writers Award. His work has appeared in the Lana Turner, APR, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He directs the Baltic Writing Residency in Sweden, Scotland, and Blackacre Nature Preserve.
