What machines
we are, clawing at the lack
of air in our sleep, imagining
a song, hearing it, realizing
it’s been done before, though
the idea of being done for
molds to the moment, our age
blooming like a courtesy. This time
of year should be a reckoning
but each year folds into the sky
like origami on fire, the idea
of belonging fading
into the backdrop. Shortly
before each word, I imagine
it unfolding into its own
circus dissolving. Accidents expect
to happen, the dirt under your
nails expected and arrived there.
Adam Clay is the author of A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006). A third book of poems is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Crab Orchard Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review Online, Black Warrior Review, Iowa Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. He co-edits TYPO Magazine and teaches at the University of Illinois Springfield.