With A Bright Room
The body is on fire. What do you do?
Owls are leaving their shadows to dance and peck and weep.
Smoke is already rising. Already packing its bags
for the next train. The bags are packed with what it remembers:
Breaking a bone by jumping too high and too far.
Losing faith in the stars.
Enough dust on the ground to make wings with.
And now, the body has a stampede inside of it.
Three-legged horses, blind bears, all silent and glowing.
No people though. The body can’t hold the weight of anybody
else.
What do you do? You don’t weep. The flames are changing
color. The beasts inside the body are ready to come out, ready
to gash and lick and cry over you.
What do you do? You build as fast as you can. You build
a house and pray you’re done before the body is gone.
You build a home and pray it doesn’t get taken away.
The Howl Cycle
1. The wolves dug her out of the ground.
They pulled the leaves out of her hair. They licked the blood
off her face and made sure her heart was still beating.
2. As a sign of gratitude, she offered herself for the wolves
to eat. She held out her newly cleaned hands.
3. The wolves sniffed around her ankles. They sniffed around
her newly clean hands. And they accepted.
They swallowed her down into their wolf bellies.
4. In each of their bellies, she became her whole self.
She was smaller. And she was cleaner. But she was the same
person, alive and beautiful, in each of the wolves‘ bellies.
5. She listened to their hearts beating, all at once.
This sound helped her sleep. Each one sounded slightly different.
6. She didn’t grow old, even as the wolves did.
7. As each wolf’s heart gave out, stopped pumping, dried up
like a peach in winter, she moved in to replace it.
The wolves kept going, and then she was all of their hearts.
8. The wolves found a small girl buried in the ground.
Their hearts began to sing, each one on a different note, forming
a grayed, furred, choir. The small girl dug herself out.
Dalton Day received his B.A in Literature & Language from the University of North Carolina Asheville, where he was awarded the Topp/Grillot Poetry Prize. His work has appeared or will appear in Heavy Feather Review, Rufous City Review, CAP, and Former People, among others. His first chapbook Supernova Factory was released by On the Cusp Press in 2013. Currently he is a poetry editor for Freeze Ray Poetry and can be found at myshoesuntied.tumblr.com.
