ONE TRUTH OF CARING

ADAM DAY

If you become a stream, runaway,

my aunt told me. From then on, my body

was a card catalogue, the neighbor’s

bed, a used car lot. She stenciled

her naked self with cats’ eyes,

upholstered herself with maps

of the city’s waterways. Put me in a vanity

drawer; supplied charcoals, pastels,

oil paints. I etched with my nails

into the wood rot. Within those confines

I grew a bridge of teak, and armory

with awnings. I finally emerged

when I felt the woman had died.

She hung in city hall against

a marble wall, like a lung, a gang

from a gallows. I took her down

against the advice of officials,

chaplains; put her in the vanity

drawer and climbed in after.

I drew an iron caisson, built

a dock from the silt up, a boathouse;

wrought a black wig, crocheted

a lace collar, and watched her run away

down our dock, tumble into quiet water.

Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020), 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 America Literary Award. He is the publisher of the cultural magazine, Action, Spectacle.