Love Letter from Edda Göring

Let’s go eat somewhere
they can’t see

what we’re doing
under the table;

we’ll chew the whale
to pieces,

and bowels tight
with happiness,

you can scream
“I’m the giant,

I’m the giant,”
if you’re

ordered to.
Talking is safer

than sitting still.
It will be a bright

spring night,
the chestnut trees’

white blossoms
laying like dry skin

on the sidewalks,
stone lions covered

in astral light.
Electrical sighs

mourning the destruction
of thousands

of little machines
still

in working order.
We’ll sweep the snow

into the sea
and I’ll be

your monkey-woman;
you can watch

me bathe.
I’ll believe

in anything
if you’ll

believe in anything,
my often-too-late

little Pol Pot,
my catamite

with the bog-brown
eyes to sink into.

Then again, I can’t
bear men—

their melancholy,
and annoying

thoroughness,
their resistance

to cleaning
the bathroom,

their knee bends,
hoofs protruding

from their asses,
the battles

more boring
than horrible.

Men like this
make history.

An underpaid
accountant

and socialist,
human or something

of the sort,
I have a future

as a pacifist.
That I’m

still alive
proves nothing.

You’re not
responsible

for the dark kid
horse-kicked

and folded
in the ditch. Still,

I’m worried
about something

but I’m not sure
what or why. 

The sun hovering
flatly in the sky

unwilling to either
rise or set

you will stand
and walk off

toward the East
toward the war,

to search
for your regiment

once more. This time
you must try

and see
if you can succeed

in dying.
There’s nothing,

you’re not
capable of.  

Adam Day is the author of A Model of City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and is the recipient of a PSA Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Emerging Writers Award.His poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, Sweet Mammalian, American Poetry Review, ​Cordite Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry London, and elsewhere. He directs The Baltic Writing Residency in Sweden, Scotland, and Bernheim Arboretum & Research Forest.