Hello, Field

by Adam Clay

Her cold tongue shriveled like a baby’s fist
When she slept. To be a cosmic murmur

After death, to be a banjo string in space,
She only spoke at the leering moon

When its fullness and form forced the night
To swagger as if made only of veins

And drunk on its own blood.
Like a tattoo of a fly on a girl’s wrist,

The tree lunges its branches
Through the slivered windshield of a truck

In a field of burnt cotton. At night,
She crawls down to the tree, bleeds into a jar,

And scourges the sky with her offering
For the fever that goads those to sing this song.


Adam Clay lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas and co-edits Typo Magazine. He has work forthcoming in Black Warrior Review and poems in Octopus, Milk, Can We Have Our Ball Back?, Three Candles, and Tarpaulin Sky.

Adam Clay was nominated for Poets Under 30 by the storySouth editors.