Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art
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    • Isobel O'Hare, "Failure: A Love Letter"
    • Melissa Wiley, "Barbed Wire Fence"
    • Ashley Wilkinson, "fractional distillation"
  • Art
Picture

Adam Clay

Collected Translations


Moments, not decades,
flash in the mind,

but what for?

In any given moment
we know our thoughts

but would it make sense for the water
to know every action as well?

Another breakfast gone.

For the tomato plant
wrecked by winter, there’s

something to be said for the island
that’s more alligator

than ninety acres of land
peering to the north, water

around it we might as well
walk on. A pint of blueberries

gone, except for three
on the floor. It’s never dark

in the mind—the lake’s slow

waves invade all thoughts,
welcome the past like tremors

left behind in the ground’s
cursive and careful bends.



Your Hope For


Going elsewhere with the windows down,
voices scattering
alongside the road, red-winged
blackbirds nearly flying

into the car, curtains opening up
to a Sunday like any Sunday but also like
no Sunday: there’s a voice we forget
but why remember when new voices

filter in through the trees?
A place here or there might
be enough, though should
the fish turn back and belly up,

then we will be reborn
in only the way the living can be:
the grass so manically green
it cannot make sense.



Winter Song


Suppose your language like snow:
the ground captured by the silence

between words and the words
less and less important
than they once were, though

not for the time that’s passed
since you spoke them.

I have thoughts sometimes so strange

their departure is only made more bizarre
from their glow. A car careens

from a thought in the mind
and onto the street,

the hills more and more vertical,
the love unshared ends up shoveled

from the sidewalks,
piled along the frozen lake
of your eye, as if any start

is the only type of beginning
ever imagined. I want

a world like you imagine
the world should be

but in pausing,
it’s a song for the grass,

a song for the few gullible
left among us, a song

for our desire for anaphora
in a strangely functional time,

a place void of curtains.  When
I leave town,

I leave a part of myself behind
and a part of yourself behind
the house,

the leaves piled around
so symmetrical and certain.




Picture
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.

published by
The Department of English
College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
The William Paterson University of New Jersey
Copyright © 2012-2022 Map Literary
Map Literary

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  • About
    • Masthead
    • Submissions
    • Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award
    • NJ High School Writing Contest
    • In Print
    • Subscribe
    • Links
    • Internship Opportunity
    • WPU MFA
  • Poetry
    • Richard Ryal
    • Sherwood Anderson
    • Mark DeCarteret
    • Dennis Hinrichsen Poetry
    • Daniel Biegelson
    • Natan Last
    • Jim Daniels Poetry
    • Michael Chang
    • D E Steward
    • Benjamin Paloff Poetry
    • David Dodd Lee
    • Isabelle Doyle
    • Kathleen Heil
    • Leonard Kress
    • Lauren Tess
    • Cesca Janece Waterfield
    • Billy Cancel Poetry
    • Scott Minar
    • Greg Glazner
    • Bruce McRae
    • Maureen Thorson
  • Fiction
    • On Experimental Fiction
    • Mark Cassidy, "How I Met My Wife"
    • Emily Trachtenberg, "Plum"
    • Hector Donovan-Gonzalez
    • Christopher Linforth, "Zia"
    • Jenessa Abrams, "You Never Wish That Upon Anyone"
    • Eros Livieratos, "On Feeling"
    • Halsted M. Bernard, "Your Hands"
    • Justin Meckes, "The Gash"
    • Reb Livingston, from "Bombyonder"
    • Craig Foltz, "Without Stigma"
  • Nonfiction
    • Martha Wiseman, "Loose Ends"
    • Jan Jolly, "Through My Father's Glasses"
    • Kristina Moriconi, "Still Looking"
    • Wm. Anthony Connolly, "IGY"
    • Cal Freeman, "Loosestrife"
    • W.F. Lantry, "The Strange Beauty of the Unfamiliar"
    • Michael Roloff, "Accretion"
    • Andrew Sunshine, "John Hancock's John Hancock"
    • Diane Payne, "3 micro memoirs"
    • Luc Sante, "Flesh and Bone"
    • Isobel O'Hare, "Failure: A Love Letter"
    • Melissa Wiley, "Barbed Wire Fence"
    • Ashley Wilkinson, "fractional distillation"
  • Art