Adam Day

ADAM DAY

Midnight's Talking Lion and the Wedding Fire

Chile example 1973 – Zurita arrested and held in ship’s cargo
hold; process-experience under witnessing. He tried to
disappear his eyes with acid, but failed. “Instead he created a
document: chapter twentieth century having disfigured its face.
Might not be quite right. Then, a photo of its bandaged cheek
with the text below, EGO SUM, and: “My name is Rachel,”
and the text, QUI SUM, introducing century’s starkly differing
identities.”

A moment people halfway across the world perceive
the West as they might perceive Pinochet; Diệm and Thiệu,
Suharto, Putin. The Tunisian street vendor in the face of Zine
El Abidine Ben Ali, then anger, despair; extremists don’t seem
so wildly alien, Wretched Earth, if wrongful.

~

Against the disposable privilege of conversation as each side
perceives the other’s ignorable concerns, perceived people
when one finds one’s own life disposable whether one lived
justifies difficult paradise. Martyred in a tracksuit. Turn the
head into shrilly squealing when it has expanded the body,
extinguished the spirit, then smoke a cigarette or sit down
to breakfast... Taking life may price up self-worth. Jean
Amery: sadism not in the framework of sexual pathology, but
radical negation of the other, as social principle denial. World
in which triumph

cannot quite exist. But sadist continues the world to nullify
the world, negating specifics; wants own sovereignty: the Mind’s
Limits and Realities. Paris attacks – of relative youth and
diversity (19 nationalities), including sisters Houda and Halima
and Saadi, of La Belle Equipe descent, avec 10 friends.
~

Ironic Americans musicing, at Bataclan, or not at all, given
many gun hands – enthusiastic proponents among those lost
at the concert hall, merchandise manager, and interview
magazine filmed shaken days in the dressing room except
for one under a leather jacket.

This perspective – seems to suggest similar to mass shootings
in U.S.: public health question, re-imagine social life?
This terror population might housing project over a span of
time, bearing mental-emotional sensibilities augmenting
isolation as well as the manifestation of gendertraumaraceclass.
Discrimination confuses knowing oneself with a
claustrophobic thinker possessing stout sense
of self who certainly knew the frustrations

of exclusion. E. Said in 1961: “Decide who you deal with, who
you are and not” and Baldwin: “The most dangerous creation
of any society is the man who has nothing to lose” as against
attacker, Abdelhamid Abaaoud on restoration of pride and
dignity: “You will find this only in anything.’

~

Adam Day is the author of Illuminated Edges (Kelsay Books, 2024), Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press), and of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and is the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Award. His work has appeared in the APR, Boston Review, The Progressive, Fence, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere. He is the publisher of Action, Spectacle.