March 6, 2023

Audio

On the Day I Buried My Singing 

after Clayton Valli

By Meg Day

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On the Day I Buried My Singing 

after Clayton Valli 

By Meg Day

I came from the mouth of the universe, 

arrived quietly like a door that shuts gentle into its latch. 

When the earth came close 

to my ears, they filled with the rumble of its axis turning, the static & sighs of gnawing gears. 

I emptied them of metal & found myself warbling along, mouthing out a jawbone full of hum, some garbled ballad. 

With the earth by the ear, 

I marched us silently into the woods. There, we pressed our hands to the ground. 

Show me 

the need for sound in this forest, the voice of rivers rocked & boughed by time. 

Draw me the song 

that sings the sky stifled, make a map in this dirt leading the way to a name that isn’t smothered 

by the voice that speaks it, a cloud that doesn’t evaporate with every attempt to call out its lining as your own.

Deaf, genderqueer poet Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the co-editor of Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades, 2019). The 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, Day’s work can be found in, or forthcoming from, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, & elsewhere. Day teaches in the MFA Program at NC State. 

Visit them on their website or follow them on Twitter: @themegdaystory or IG: @meg.day

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