Adam Day

A Kind of Speech

                  After Simone Muench

These fragments, language,
my ruins. Like a blind

machine, a sea captain
who doesn’t trust

the stars or the light
inside his skull, carried

off by an unsteady skiff
into the moon-swallowed

shadows. Words – dark
deciphering birds of flight,

a secret symmetry
restless in its syllable socket.

Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020) and Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books). He is also the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Award. His work has appeared in the APR, Boston Review, The Progressive, Fence, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He is the publisher of Action, Spectacle.