[Whereas my own insignificance is vast…]
Whereas my own insignificance is vast
in the dream of the pajama drawer ransacked
(no redemption song, no party affiliation)
We wonder what to stand up to and whom:
natural resources or false pipettes?
Warm wind ruffles receipts
and the sawing of evening insects floats in.
Among the unhoused meanwhile are some
anxiously circling the problem of shape
in squirrel caps, tattered gaiters,
futures filled with dull smoke and
staler mirrors
The experiment fails. The hat falls.
Two crows eye the dead of a different species
as if bored by the prospect of another job
in the animal racket.
[Please, can you help this individual?]
Please, can you help this individual?
She waxes wanes lies cheats poses kneels
as if to sew:
How many pairs of bored-stiff jeans can in fact offset
(she asks)
a Biedermeir bathing suit?
Would you prefer a head carved in stone or cheese?
If a leaf is a form of earlier leaves
we’ll go great lengths to flower
is a question I never thought of asking,
yearning up the stem.
Movement first, then drills.
That’s the way it was and is, then.
Opposite oxen keep trying
to tear these pants apart
but we are smart:
“If the clothesline’s real, the pins must be
its abstractions”
leaving just coronas
where would be silhouettes
or sap
finer and more filtered
filiating as we unfold
in formal procession.
—
Jean Day is a poet, editor, and retired union activist whose involvement in the San Francisco Bay Area literary scene spans more than four decades. She was executive director of Small Press Distribution in its early days and subsequently worked for many years as associate editor of the interdisciplinary humanities journal Representations. The poems here are from her new book The Elements (Winter Editions, November 2026). Other recent publications include the chapbook Resistless (Ergo, 2026) and The Night Before the Day on Which (Roof Books, 2022). New poems can also be found in recent numbers of The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Tripwire, California Quarterly, and Second Factory.