Model of a City in Civil War

Model of a City in Civil War Poems by Adam Day

Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game.

— Theodor Adorno

The house itself is none of these appearances: it is… the geometrized projection of these perspectives and of all possible perspectives, that is, the perspectiveless position from which all can be derived… not the house seen from nowhere, but the house seen from everywhere.

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Grateful acknowledgement to the editors of the following publications, where these poems, sometimes in different versions, first appeared:

AGNI: “The Children, the Grass” (published as [Here are the Children]” and “Combine”

Antioch Review: “Hiding Again, in London”

Carolina Quarterly: “His Dementia”

Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art: “Sarclet” and “Dakota”

Colorado Review: “Condensation Cube”

Copper Nickeclass="underline" “Blind Attis”

Crab Orchard Review: “Snow in a Gdansk Courtyard”

dcomP magazine: “The Revolution”

FIELD: “Water from the Same Source”

Forklift: Ohio: “He Speaks of Old Age” (published as “Old Age”)

Gulf Coast: “Anoosh’s Obituary for Himself, to His Son”

Handsome: “The Mayor in Sky Blue Socks” (published as “[Deer herd in the icy fields]”)

Hotel Amerika: “Apprehended at a Distance” (published as “[The colorless lake, buoy bells in fog]”) and “Model of a City in Civil War” (published as “[A diorama of a city in civil war]”)

Indiana Review: “Fårö” (published as “The Dinner Party”)

iO: A Journal of New American Poetry: “Time Away” (published as “Shark and Dog”)

Jelly Fish: “Elebade”

Kenyon Review: “Diorama — (Scarlet and Liver)” (published as “Gallows Portraits”) and “Family Romance”

Madison Review: “Sleeping with Uncle Lester”

Mid-American Review: “The Kinghorse Butchertown Brawl”

Louisville Review: “Strapping”

Margie and Verse Daily: “The Cow”

Meridian: “Before the War”

New Madrid and Verse Daily: “Clean Lines, Diffuse Lighting” (as “Mother’s Hair”)

New Orleans Review: “The Insomniac”

North American Review: “We Lived Above a Key Shop”

Pebble Lake: “The Leaving” and “Winter Inventory”

Poetry London: “A Plateau of Excellence”

Roanoke Review: “Coming In at Night” (as “Coming In from the Back Porch at Night”)

Salt Hill: “Orr’s Island”

Stilclass="underline" “Washing My Old Man” (as “Washing Father’s Feet”) and “Now and Forever” (as “Badger Philosphes”)

Subtropics: “In Mourning” (as “Badger in Mourning”)

Sycamore Review: “A Polite History” and “ ” (as “[From such material it is almost impossible…]”)

Third Coast: “Smoke”

Third Coast: “Winter Fever” (published as “The Good Winter”)

TYPO: “Unease”

The following poems first appeared in the chapbook, Badger, Apocrypha, published as part of the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship series: “Winter Nights,” “The Revolution,” and “In Mourning.”

My deep thanks to the wonderful team at Sarabande, and to everyone else who has supported me and my writing, many of whom I have the honor to call friend: Philip Levine, David Alworth, Ellyn Lichvar, my son Alistair Day, Kathleen Graber, Cathy Wagner, Cal Bedient, Fritz Ward, G.C. Waldrep, Bruce Smith, Hannah Gamble, Ashley Capps, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Tom Sleigh, Sarah Arvio, David Lehman, James Tate, Heather Patterson, Aleks Karlsons, Kathleen Driskell, David Baker, Sumita Chakraborty, Sven Birkerts, Timothy Donnelly, Jeffrey Skinner, Breth Fletcher Lauer, David Lynn, Alice Quinn, Maurice Manning, Jillian Weise, Don Bogen, Joshua Poteat, Tony Hoagland, Sally Connelly, Martha Greenwald, Josh English, Jeff Hipsher, Ben Lord, Philip White, Lisa Williams, Jason Schniederman, Michael Estes, David Harrity, Kyle Coma Thompson, Broc Rossell, Mark Neely, Greg and Beth Steinbock, Gayann and Robert Day, Elizabeth Hamsley, Tony Hamsley, Sam Sims, Ken Walker, Michael Cooley, Scott Ward, Jay Baron Nicorvo, Mitchell Waters, Taylor Roberts, John James, Jessica Farquhar, Amy Attaway, Jessica Worthem, Anthony Carelli, Colleen Ammerman, Will Lobko, Madeline Schwartz, Robin LaMer Rahija, Makalani Bandele, Sean Patrick Hill, Duncan Barlow, Kathy Barbour, Kari Kalve, Alen Hamza, David Ebenbach, Kyle McCord, Ellie Schilling, and the crew at Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville.

Special thanks to the Poetry Society of America, New York University, the University of Houston, and to the Kentucky Arts Council for their generous support.

BEFORE THE WAR

I was a woman before the war—
we took the arms of our enemies
and swung them from our crotches.
And lived with them there
until, like ticks, they grew inward, and we
were the first men. But we didn’t want
those stolen limbs anymore, and so tried
by force to give them back, hoping
the fists would come alive inside
women and grab hold. But when we were done
the arms only hung dumbly
between our tired legs, shrinking in time—
a useless door handle, a hung shadow
we walk upon.

MODEL OF A CITY IN CIVIL WAR

Men carry a mattress retrieved
from a dumpster past the flooded
foundations of an unfinished
high-rise, an old woman catches
a pigeon in the folds of her dress,
the dead smile and rise from swimming
pools or stand at attention
on stamps. The landscape can’t believe
it’s real — there is no ground
beneath it, like what mirrors do.
The velvet-curtained walls
of a movie theater. On screen
the hanged men speak
to one another from broken
necks, and the aspen leaves
show white in the dark.

COMBINE

Captain Nazret helped the Communists overthrow Haile
Selassie and when
he discovered his wife’s infidelities sewed her into bed
as she slept
and moved his family to the Isle of Man, where he retired
and began losing
his mind, so that one All Hallows’ he pasted a mustache
onto the pastor’s
sorrel mare and rode it through the cobbled streets of Cregneash
saying to the costumed kids,
“Come pet comrade Stalin.” Children loved the old
syphilitic because
he’d show them his stomach’s gnarled track of surgery scars, because
of the violet-backed
sunbird he kept until the neighbor’s cat, with wet green eyes,
reached a paw
through the cage bars, and snagged the bird on one hooked claw
so that a crosshatch
of feathers and blood tattooed the tile floor. That night kids drugged
the Siamese
with cough medicine and stapled it by the scruff to its owner’s
picket fence.