Model of a City in Civil War. Adam Day

“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”

      Still: “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.

       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

       Model of a City in Civil War

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.

      •

      On a Siberian expedition, Nikolai Bryukhanov brought the wrong

      food for the sledge-dogs,

      so they had to be killed. But not by the squeamish Commissar.

      On the third day

      of Bryukhanov’s trial, Stalin sent a note with accompanying

      illustration that read:

      “To the members of the Politburo, For all the sins, past and present, hang B.

      by