An Adult’s Guide to Nightfall
- An Adult’s Guide to Nightfall
Stitching the dark is restless noise,clicks and trills, a bass-line pulse, as ifsouls released at the death of light thus huma way through doubtful night. We thirst,
but lie still in our beds. From shadowto sight, an opossum bares its Noh-mask face,a sketch of fear, the tail a cord of fleshboth naked and snake-like. Alien.
Nightly to the woods, by paths that fade,past gold eyes deep in the trees, we golike children to find the witch in the clearing.Sleep is that story we breathe to ourselves
in the uncharted wake of day, a hymn,from the near bank of light to the far,of our solo passage, the shape of whicheach one must learn, in time, by heart. [End Page 53]
Jennifer Brown has taught creative writing and literature in high schools, colleges, summer programs, and festivals and has held residencies at the Weymouth Center for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. In 2018, she won the Linda Flowers Literary Award from the NC Humanities Council. Her essays and poems appear in North Carolina Literary Review, Utterance: a Journal, IthacaLit, and Atticus Review, and are forthcoming in the L.A. Review and Copper Nickel.
