Just before the record skipped
the breakers were plowing
through the sky,
marking it with white lines of foam.
Then the sky sank
into the barbed wire of night
like a mute sea that nothing explains
like cardinals swallowing themselves
like jellyfish twisting in the asphyxiated night.
And like a scream the crowd kept moving
through the corridor of police
turning their screams inside out
like leaves that cling to trees
too long into winter,
like the calving of icebergs,
like the beaches that were scars
in the crying cheeks of the night.
Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press), 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. His work has appeared in the APR, Boston Review, The Progressive, Volt, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He is the publisher of Action, Spectacle.