“Heimweh Funicular” by Adam Day
Heimweh Funicular
It was not
the socialism
we dreamed of:
principled but allowing
for private
bourgeois niceties,
rebuilding a rare
Hispano-Suiza,
ejecting a joke
against the state,
staging an exhibition
above a hosiery
shop, amassing
polite glass
sculptures or time
in the presence
of another’s
musical giftedness,
avoiding the over
presence of the proletarian,
acceptance of a pleasant
under-investment
in the political. These
were the orchestral
aspects of life
to which the citizen
devoted her most
painstaking labor,
though
the public
would scarcely
hear them.
***
Adam Day is the recipient of a 2010 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and is also the recipient of a 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award. His work has appeared in the Boston Review, Guernica, AGNI, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, APR, and elsewhere. He coordinates The Baltic Writing Residency in Latvia, and is an editor for the literary and comics journal, Catch Up. He is currently writer-in-residence at Earlham College.
