by Adam Day

In Louisville
we tie hemp rope

around major general
Breckinridge’s neck,

the separation from
plinth gesturing

at identity formation
and Louie XVI’s marble

hand is broken
off, though 

in late 1700s France
the commune took 

his head. Performance
of protest. Fairytales 

are real
but they have corpses

and men pushing
empty strollers.

Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020), and of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Award. He is the editor of the forthcoming anthology, Divine Orphans of the Poetic Project, from 1913 Press, and he is the publisher of the cultural magazine, Action, Spectacle.