Tuesday poem #235 : Adam Clay : Lincoln Avenue in the Early Morning Hours

The morning sun smears the clouds

away from the color white

for the first time

like every time.

Think about anything and it won’t

make sense at first or think

so much that dust becomes

a heart beating

through the trance of existence,

through the long stretch of life

toward a single touch.

Fragments of metaphor

litter the mind, waiting for the color

of light they’ll be held up against:

blue void of bliss

or red smudged the blur of a fire truck

in the early hours

of life, forgotten over time.

Because memories need no color,

they so easily shed themselves of it.

Adam Clay is the author of Stranger (Milkweed Editions, 2016), A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World (Milkweed Editions, 2012), and The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006). A fourth book is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Georgia Review, Boston Review, Iowa Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan