PROSE POETRY
Nyctophilia
She’s a secret the night is reluctant to reveal
She likes to wear black on her night walks. Wandering through its soft density, she wants not to startle it, wants it to fall and flow and flower around her, as if she weren’t there, as if she were merely one of its shadows. Cloaked in darkness, she’s a secret the night is reluctant to reveal.
Night is never just blackness — her eyes drift upwards to night’s shifting visage. Tonight, the sky is consumptive; blood-tinged clouds, strangely veined, span across a murky void, like lungs in an x-ray image. The faded moon is hushed and blanketed away, a madwoman in a midnight attic.
Past twilight, this suburb grows wilder. The pavements suffer from fever-dreams, surging and splitting with sudden epiphanies, recalling what lies beneath. Releasing old-soul soil, teeming with memories of long-ago fecundity, yearning to sprout something untamed. Laneways become liminal, shimmering unreality under streetlights, whilst weeds tell tales of when they once thrived.
An owl regards her silently from a roof-top, an enigmatic omen she can’t quite decipher. Always an archetype, it is hunting ghosts — tiny marsupials long extinct. But the owl still remembers the sounds of their scurries, the feel of their breaking bones in its beak.
