A worm split in two must be
an ideogram for something.
Someone once said nothing
incomprehensible on earth can exist—
rather, one’s vantage point
obscures understanding past
the point of sanity. Yes, this world
belongs to scavengers, and yes
we are briefly a part of it. This city
could be any city alive enough
to be mistaken for an elsewhere.
Often our linear notions are nothing
more than whims: the weather carries
this thought like a balloon to the clouds,
the lake below a tiny memory
of a door boarded up from the inside.
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.