3 Poems by Dalton Day
Dalton Day
Dear Can You Speak Up Just A Little Bit
You keep losing your balance.
You say things like
The sky has stranded me here
& I used to think you meant
you were an alien, only
wanting to return to your
home planet, but you don’t.
I’m sorry I can’t take
the tornado out of you, that I
keep building gyroscopes
for you to swallow down, only
to add one more direction
for you to forget. If you lay
down, the world will lay down,
too. & if you get back up,
you get back up. That’s all.
Love,
Is This Loud Enough?
Beware of Falling Deer
Even though they don’t die, they could still kill you, if you are standing right beneath them. People are worried about their cars, their houses. The damage that has occurred & will occur with each impact. I’ve stopped going outside, even though you haven’t. You are more worried about the deer. I watch you build a giant net in the yard, to catch them. You say it isn’t the sight of them falling that’s hard, but the sound. & as they safely land, then run into the woods to join their ever-growing numbers, I guess that’s what people don’t understand, can’t understand, about grief. You can’t assign it. It’s just assigned.
Pastoral
There you are, lying in grass
long enough for you
to be completely hidden by grass.
You are covered in red,
the color of blood, but instead
of blood, strawberries.
People don’t talk about gnats
very often, or at all,
so it is nice that you will, & do.
If a pitch goes high enough,
nothing will hear it,
except the thing that’s making it.
When you raise yourself
out of the grass, it’s because you
raise yourself out of the grass.
A thing doesn’t have to look
like a thing for it to be that thing,
except. Except. Except.
Dalton Day is a trembling dog-person & MFA candidate in The New Writers Project at UT Austin. He is the author of the collection Actual Cloud (Saló Press, 2015) & the chapbooks Fake Knife (Freezeray Press, 2015) & To Breathe I’m Too Thin (Hyacinth Girl Press, forthcoming 2016). His poems have been featured in PANK, Columbia Poetry Review, Alien Mouth, & The Offing, among others. He can be found on myshoesuntied.tumblr.com & twitter.com/lilghosthands.