Enzu Seaglass

Adam Day

Town sits like a sleeping animal
on top of a hill, drenched in mistand drizzle. Along the road, a jeep
with a silver birch growingwhere engine was. Snow
in the swale. ‘And what is death,’ Neighborasks, ‘Some mother’s or my own?’
They pop off all day at the clinic,cut into bits in the dissecting room.
Woodshadows float silentlythrough morning motes,
seaward. Inshore and farther outthe mirror of water whitens, spurned
by lightshod hurrying feet. Cloudbegins to cover slowly the sun, shadow
the bay in deeper green, bowlof bitter waters. Nickel shaving dish
in his hands, feeling coolness, smellingthe clammy slaver of the lather
where the brush is stuck. Nothinghere quite the same.

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Adam Day is the author of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande 2015), and is the recipient of a PSA Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Emerging Writers Award. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Lana Turner, APR, Poetry London, AGNI, The Iowa Review, and other publications. He coordinates The Baltic Writing Residency in Sweden, Scotland, and Blackacre State Nature Preserve.

Witness

Spring 2018

Las Vegas, Nevada

Black Mountain Institute
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Editor-in-chief: Maile Chapman
Managing Editor: Dan Hernandez
Poetry Editors: Hanna Andrews & Oscar Oswald

Witness blends the features of a literary and an issue-oriented magazine to highlight the role of the modern writer as witness to his or her times. Launched in Detroit in 1987, the magazine is best known for showcasing work that defines its historical moment; special issues have focused on political oppression, religion, the natural world, crime, aging, civil rights, love, ethnic America, and exile. The issues “New Nature Writing,” “The Sixties,” “Sports in America,” and “The Best of Witness, 1987 – 2004” eventually appeared as university press anthologies.

In 2007, Witness moved to Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The magazine now publishes one special print issue and two general online issues each year and increasingly seeks out work that contextualizes the American experience by highlighting issues of global concern.

“It’s not just that each further issue of Witness is dazzlingly strong, but that each new issue is a true anthology that deserves to be done in hardcover. It’s one of the four-star sure-fire winners.”
—Albert Goldbarth

“In an era when too many journals seem merely lukewarm, Witness turns up the heat. This is a focused, passionate journal, one that matters.”
—Mark Doty

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