Binge drinking  Sometimes I distract myself, watch Svankmajer with the family, or walk like Robert Walser, conversing cheerily with crows; but the news still bubbles madly under bouts of fierce bad skin, bursts forth in pints of wine and whisky...

      Blue Lilies The blue lilies celebrating my pregnancy I placed in a vase of blue-wash pottery. A sweet force had somehow swept through the gristle and splinters and sediments and sticky bubbles of my polycystic ovaries. I told her stories, lots,...

      Floors of Vapor Plover inside a crocodile’s mouth, blinking the clouds from its eyes. Doing nothing is difficult.     Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020), and of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books),...

      Liminal   Before he died, he saw his parents more and more, not that it bothered him, he said, there was nothing untoward going on: they didn’t gesture him to follow nor loom at his bed in the care home; they went about their ordinary lives,...

      Neuroleptics There goes the man with the paper face stretching his arms for takeoff, his cloak flapping  open for flight. He knows every twig in these wooded grounds. He can float above every tree. Above him red squirrels chase each other across...

      Imagining Green   The leaf is the paradigmatic form of openness: life capable of being traversed by the world without being destroyed by it (The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture. Emanuele Coccia.) I was imagining green light like two...

      Tawny Owls I’ll take your owl, Paul, and Sylvia’s and raise you two, that call across the meadow on August nights; male and female: one twit, the other twoo. I won’t say which is which. No, I haven’t seen them, haven’t risked my bald pate, don’t...

      Newgale You stand at shoreline watching. Unaware the tide advances, despite decades of life by the sea, you dip your toes in icy Atlantic swell. But decay has arrived as a rip tide – pulls you under, drags you out into the bay. The men throw a...

      Plantation blues Morning light is warm quicksilver on the desert plateau of the high Monadhliath, bare stone and scoured earth the seed of man and winter. The upward flow of pines is genesis not rewilding, redcoat drumbeats on the drove road still...