Poems by Adam Day
A Kind of Silence
Kid on the corner
selling water beside
the news kiosk –
its interplay of ruin
and repair. His father
is elsewhere on his knees
eating weeds, body
the blue-green of frozen pond
in a Bruegel, and still asking
in his aloneness
how much of what’s not said
is what cannot be said, or perhaps
more importantly, what
the speaker is unwilling to say,
what they are withholding.
Stoplight Rain
Propane tanks
tossed in the yard,
neighbor went inside
dressed and came
out naked, the whole
horse of him
with nowhere
to put his wallet.
What do you need,
love, what kind
of enough
would be enough?
The Trust
Man on an oil
derrick in grave
clothes is a kingfisher
bowing in a pool
of broken light.
Still, the moon isn’t
all that beautiful
boom-hinged
to a platform
offshore, like a bucket
lost down a well.
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.