6.04 / April 2011

Two Poems

Mrs. Speaks

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She stands before a window speaking
with a friend, she shifts like compost collapsing
beneath a dress in summer heat. On her nose
a wreck of warts that glisten in light like elvers.
She’s remembering out loud: “When the workers
marched Badger came home to find Henry
had my skirt up past my garters, and a leg
of lamb hot on the table.  And I told him?
Eat up before it gets cold.” In the halflight,
the way the shadows played his face, he looked
like a bearded woman. But, Badger was a bullock.
He took me hard by the arm, on a night walk,
watched an owl snatch a cat from the road, Badger
mewling and hooting beneath stuttering streetlights,
watching with the subtle giddy smile of a retarded child.


Badger Tells of News

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Neighbors brought news
of a rape. They stapled her hair
to the headboard. We wondered
if they had hands; tongues
were found – a kind
of penance, we thought. More
than one. There were hoof-prints
in the morning mud.
The umbrella was still
in its stand. It was bored
with itself – it will not talk. Which,
of course, may be very kind,
considering.


Adam Day’s chapbook, Badger, Apocrypha, won a 2010 Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Fellowship. His work has appeared in the Boston Review, AGNI, Forklift: Ohio, American Poetry Review, Guernica, The Kenyon Review, Verse Daily, The Iowa Review, BOMB, and elsewhere, was included inBest New Poets 2008, and was nominated for 2008 Pushcart Prize and was an Honorable Mention for a 2009 Pushcart. He is the recipient of a Kentucky Arts Council grant. He coordinates The Baltic Writing Residency in Latvia, and is Associate Editor for the journal of literature and graphic arts,Catch Up, and a contributing editor to the online literary journal Memorious.