WE GO QUIETLY
Moss grows
around her mouth,
grass from her tongue.
The naming action
that normally
makes sense fails;
So, let’s be quiet,
tell medium truths,
so many kinds
of truths.
BIRD-SILENT BODY
Purple and silver
thistle growing
between broken glass
and unheated stones.
Drone glow
bleaches green
from trees, air
empty but full sharp
weaponless play.
THE OTHER SILENCE
The sisters carry
darkness up
the mountain.
Silence may be
all that is
at the other end.
THE PRESENT FIRE
Suburban coyotes
caught, legs zip-tied,
dropped into
a dry well. The world
in which she finds
herself and might
define herself
does not exist;
so she does not exist
for that world. The pale
light of insufficient
answer.
WATERFALLING GENERATION
Future children
of present fire
of not enough;
leaf only a web
of veins, house’s
naked beams.
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, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere.