A Brittle Flower Sliding Into Cold Water

Dalton Day is a kindergarten teacher. He can be found at tinyghosthands.com.

This poem was selected by September poetry curator Leslie McIntosh, who writes: “In Day’s prose sonnet, the form of the text is less a ladder to scale but a mirage—its moments flicker in and out of focus, though not to deceive. Rather, the opposite. In Day’s approach to memory, I was reminded of Pessoa and had to seek out the source of that familiarity: ‘Since I wasn’t able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.’ from The Education of the Stoic. Memory’s reach toward logos need not be perfect—in fact, better it not. The volta Day crafts in the eighth sentence reminds, as Pessoa does, that the contradictions of our lives are connected by truths that extend beyond us, and inevitably, toward others.”

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