MEG DAY

Aubade to Day


Last night I dreamt I’d forgotten my name
or driven it off like a fox through the split-rail

& into the long grass that can’t help but divulge
the direction of the wind. More than once,

I’ve been without—& more than once I’ve run
my padded bones along the braided bottom teeth

of summer, confusing heat with light & feeling
for the peak that christens predators with sharper

tongues than prey. There are some shades of night
so tender they swallow sound without chewing.

Pretend this is the first time you’ve seen me 
crouch & tuck my hands under the resting scaffold

of a body limp with sleep, or worse. Pretend 
your teeth don’t pull flesh from the peach’s pit

the way maggots eat around the tendons that hold 
the heart inside the chest of the fawn felled by a fox

in the soundless down of that black yard. Where 
is the sun! Look at the long grass open like a wound

where this small life left an even gentler night. Can
you see its blood across the door of my chest

like a promise? Can you hear me screaming my last
name into its neck as if it would turn the earth?


203  The Paris-American

Meg Day is the 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street 2014), winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Prize and the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. Day is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College and lives in Lancaster, PA. www.megday.com

---

  Next week's poet:
  
  Franny Choi