The Sky’s Sky

Snakes of river fog,
women arm in arm,

slow rain
in the woods, movement

of mind, lotuses rocking
as a boat casts off.

A History of Violence

The earth
gives up

its dead, un-
disappearing

the breathless,
even the asphalt,

cracked like the sea,
sounds out

lost names.
Flecks of blood

evaporating
in the night,

they get up
out of their

corpses, camellias
growing from

their empty eyes
they turn

to the stuttering
sky, with mouths

of light.

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.