No night— summer night, winter night, moon-smudged night, night clear, night clinging like wet clothes to the soil’s skin: goose-pimpled, dew-touched— no night is so dark that you cannot see the darkness and make out the shapes
where ghosts congregate like coyote, panting from carrion to carrion, pulling apart what once lived cord by cord.
The coyote is not a kind teacher. The ghost is full on my flesh, is of the flesh, and any night—spring night, autumn night,
wind-whorled night, night long, night short, night shadow-striped like far mountains breaking the horizon, far mountains growing from the hilltops in the middle distance—
all nights they visit, these ghosts. They visit, these dead of mine. Even after death I need them and in my need keep them suspended
like burnt stars, like coyotes wilting by their hind legs on chain-link spikes, writhing in their failure to fly. Nickel, Skylar: I am sorry I let you go on without me. I wish a life was not worth so much.
But these nights—color-drained night, storm night, timid night, night shining like a black and white film print, night caked in the grime we collect in our living—these nights when the ghosts,
the dead, my dead, my two dead friends like coyotes hunger-howl and circle-sulk with gnashing teeth, I shiver; I avert my eyes.
I am alive but living the way ivy lives: a slow creep, a crawl to the light reached by standing on all that does not rise or ceases to rise, all that is suspended between heaven and earth, tangled in the knots of another’s need. Yes—no night so dark that I cannot recognize the faces pressed against that darkness.
Brock William Storey is an MFA graduate from Southern Illinois University where he was a 2024-2025 Master's Fellow. He is the recipient of a 2024 & 2025 Academy of American Poets College and University Prize. His work appears or is forthcoming in the Southeast Review & West Trade Review. He currently lives in New York.
