Poem by Meg Day

Listening in the Dark                                  


Even in this light, I can see
your want. A gulley appears        


in the hard bare field between
those fenced brows & opens 


into shallow beds tilled temple
to temple as if the glut of a flood


had been swallowed to reveal
the land’s contour underneath. 


Habit—or hurt—has made
your surface smooth (its true


smallholding kept submerged) 
& I drink of this drought 


like I’m told a new calf gasps 
for air when its muzzle is cleaned 


of that which had only just 
kept it subsisting. Is it still
        
synesthesia if I have no choice
but to use my eyes as ears? You 


laugh then, your teeth fitted
around the steady static grumble


of the sea below us, your eyes
a yes or no question I’ve waited


seasons to seed. Operator, are you
there? My hands have never been 


so pleased to be my mouth, so
my mouth can be other things. 


The moon is a sickle that swings
despite the plow’s augured return


& in my fingers is your name 
I plant again & again in the ground. 

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

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