Issue 15: Adam Day
Cuckolded
Burrower, grub-worm, Mister, it rains
and the wet animals crawl the face
of the earth. This is the animal that lives
at the base of the throat, behind
a mouth that cannot shape words.
Someone is heaving at the kitchen door –
he has lost his beard and jowls.
Somewhere, sheet-tangled legs, the pink
twist of flesh birthing blackness, licked –
the tickling fingers unfolding, the fly-
twitched feet. A door slams, one lung
collapsed like a forest of fallen trees.
It’s a stone in the shoe. The plump
and split lips. The odor of swollen
floorboards – the sad attic’s ceiling
of insects. Mister, it’s she.
Security
Whose questions
are these? There is
an event, submerged.
The street
is a street in _____. A set
of actions is in play
here. Specific
actions. There is a
principle player
in danger. Precise
inexactitudes. But
in a way that one
enjoys. And pathos.
Surprising pathos.
There is a real population
around a car.
An act of violence
that does not
matter. But is
essential. A player
at work making nothing
happen. The story
interrogates him.
Adam Day is the author of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books, April 2015), as well as 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 Poetry London, Kenyon Review, Poetry Ireland, American Poetry Review, Stand, Iowa Review, London Magazine, and elsewhere. He directs the Baltic Writing Residency in Latvia, Scotland, and Bernheim Forest.
