Married

She sleeps alone

in the burrow beneath a tangle

of roots. A septum divides her uterus. 

At the seventh month she stepped

on a grave and our girl was born

club-footed. When I fall

asleep her little fingers creep up

and undo my necktie. Trust

is an ugly deity. She cannot

finish a cigarette without

eating it. Brother, we clean

our dead. It’s a good

we can’t imagine deserving.

Adam Day

Adam Day is the author of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books, April 2015), as well as the recipient of a 2010 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award. His work has appeared in Poetry London, Kenyon Review, Poetry Ireland, American Poetry Review, Stand, Iowa Review, London Magazine, and elsewhere. He also directs the Baltic Writing Residency in Latvia, Scotland, and Bernheim Forest.