Adam Day
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 America Literary Award. He publishes the literary journal, Action Spectacle.
The State
After Mark Bibbins
Sirens spiral away
down the block
carried in smoke
beneath the sea
of treetops, a car
stopped to search
for whatever
the police search for.
Wind any creature
tight enough
pull any creature
loose enough
and it does
what it feels
it has to do.
A generation
fully accustomed
to being struck down,
a treatise on brevity.
All you have to do
to see it is step out
onto the street;
elegy is a site
not of loss
but opposition.
I push death around
trying to make it say
what I want it to say
but the mouth opens
and branches emerge.
I don’t know what
any of this
prepares us for.
I don’t know
how anything escapes
Cordon
The assaulted,
hemmed in
among lungwort
and drone glow
like a plover
inside a crocodiles mouth,
blinking the clouds
from its eyes,
sounding out names,
eating its own light
against a body
that can’t do any more.