2 September 2002 | Vol. 2, No. 3
The Night Is Thinking and Eating
I.
The night's clean ink is interrupted by tendrils,
by ideas with robust reality,
but verdant with symbol and meaning.
Dark little scribbles zag, then zig, in insane orbit
of an electric goddess porch light,
while the velvety black mouth around them yawns
with a voice
like a prehistoric seashell pressed
to the ear of a sleeping planet.
II.
Moths, crumpled scraps of beige-brown velvet,
discard themselves randomly
on the porch's chipped paint,
earnestly settling their brown wings.
The intelligent night breathes with empathetic menace
and the signs and designs of its mind are evident
to all divinely human eyes. A quiet, terrifying exhalation
is released from this delicate, indelible tableau:
Asleep on the porch steps—the night screaming
behind them on its silent frequency—
are vampire teeth, a melancholy Halloween toy,
blue-white and tear-streaked, stained with the dry saliva of a
dull, sleeping human child, who, eaten, will taste like nothing.
About the author:
Nick Antosca, a native of New Orleans and a product of public schools, is a sophomore at Yale. His poems and fiction have appeared or are scheduled to appear in the Antietam Review, the Paumanok Review, Stirring, Retort Magazine, the Adirondack Review, Blue Monk Press, Verse Libre Quarterly, Three Candles, Red River Review, Small Spiral Notebook, Pierian Springs, Erosha, Sendecki, and USA Weekend online, among others. He recently finished writing his first novel (available to publishers in Autumn 2002) and can be contacted at nicholas.antosca@yale.edu.
For further reading:
See the complete list of work by Nick Antosca at 42opus. Browse the contents of 42opus Vol. 2, No. 3, where "The Night Is Thinking and Eating" ran on September 2, 2002. List other work with these same labels: poetry.
