In the town where you used to live, even the couches
refuse to swallow you. Animals
crossing the street are only optical illusions
based on your perspective to persist, though
everyone here sees them too. What of the streetlamps
exploding toward the unlit sky, and what of the
desire to please only no one? Your coat is somewhere
along a side street. That’s your scarf right there
hanging from the limbs of the oak, the one spent
and polluted beyond repair. The insects have turned
away—they devour the town one click over
and no one there seems to mind. In the town where
no one used to live, you are living now, your senses
all beyond a basic type of sorting out. What you are capable of here,
right now, is nothing near capable. What this town deserves
is what this town is: a place burrowed out, expecting
itself to emerge as something younger and more normal than itself.

*

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, Stranger, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. He co-edits TYPO Magazine and lives in Kentucky.