And Children Were Regarded with Suspicion

He is the first shit of the fourth
reich, in yellow galoshes. Gelding
a horse called Palestrina, has the expression
of an intelligent dog. Unreliable witness
to his own existence—he moves like
a mistake; his buttock celebrates
itself. He slit his right wrist like drawing
a watch from a pocket. Like coughing.
Above the shadow of the valley
of the kitchen sink, singing, “I’m
afeared if I don’t have a piglet, lamb,
or little calf I’ll chop my humanness
in half,” like twisting a doorknob
in a night-quiet room where two sleep
furled, and sleep, and are unaware.
 
 
 
Adam Day is the author of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books, April 2015), and the recipient of a 2010 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award. His work has appeared in the Boston Review, Lana Turner, APR, Iowa Review, AGNI, and elsewhere. He also directs the Baltic Writing Residency in Latvia, Scotland, and Bernheim Forest.