Issue 25: Adam Day
from Midnight’s Talking Lion and the Wedding Fire
Where a society is being systematically degraded claim
for societal endurance account: people’s resilience in the face
of ongoingness. Hilarious catastrophe bombardment forms
part of a larger effort to imagine a meditation “roam[ing]
the streets” of twentieth-century dramatizes the afterlife
of society [that has been] superseded influence felt through
“the physical shape of the city” exert power, however subtle,
on social relations of modern Homs, Nice, Orlando, Ramallah
if only because they did so much to construct the stage
on which those relations still unfold. Constitutes an argument
against synchronic sociality—the notion that all the elements
of a given social event occupy a single point in time. Their
interactions “overflow with elements which are already
in the situation coming from some other time”: sixteenth-
century street grid of the city, as well as “[t]he buildings
in [certain] part[s] of Beslan or Baghlan, years after war’s end
[that] ha[ve] not been rebuilt” yet “it is fairly easy to establish
some continuous connections” between interaction
and “the dreams and drawings of someone else.”
~
Questions, which defamiliarize conventional hearts, much-
studied. Develop original model for apprehending past want,
more significant than previous acknowledged. Derives from
a particularly grim period in the siege, “the daily handling
of corpses” and other -time activities take a toll on “Pain,
nostalgia, her, eyes, he, I. The positive comfort in knowing
the sun progress toward dust, as does we, as does a garage,
the ghost, reason, analogy, nerves, fingernails. The same as my
own, and by extension, the jittering leaves around us “reason
by analogy” drawing a composite of wreckage cosmological,
prehistorical, and industrial style evident in the earlier age
of analogy between “Builders” and the other, (half-men),
a certain impression of the social – “Ruts that constitute
prehistorical cart tracks “represents centuries of human
activity,”: time is calcified there, yet not arrested. Decomposing
permafrost.
~
Disappears into the waves, into the street, near the sea steps
inexplicably took his hand and began to run buildings in part
of years after war’s end had not been rebuilt. The street”
ambling the autumn of soldiers preparing for war since Suez
crisis overflowed a choppy sea of green Commando berets,
laced with white and blue naval uniforms nearby
a newspaper kiosk, red scare headlines –“urban palimpsest:”
interplay of ruin and repair—bombed-out buildings on “level
and clear” street—friction between one historical epoch
and another, disclosing both passage of time and temporal
stasis, buildings lodged in 1943, as environs, street to city
advanced to 2017 emerge, depicts devastation of War discusses
a five-thousand-year-old wreck, a megalith temple complex.
Situating enables build logic of ruin, formal structure.
~
A kind of unreliable narrator meticulous; obsessive
administration repeatedly keeping file, world dependent,
complete insofar as this chronicle dependence on survivors
disorders by the in, the of, and which. Progeny need those
crimes not committed. Further file keeping a potentially
illusory appearance that the quest led chronicles is manageable,
and “domination through knowledge” the legacy case implicitly
in a position doesn’t aim understanding, but simply, knowledge.
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 an anthology, Divine Orphans of the Poetic Project, forthcoming from 1913 Press, and his work has appeared in the Fence, Boston Review, APR, Volt, Lana Turner, Iowa Review, and elsewhere.
Copyright © 2021 by Adam Day, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
