Night Movements – by Daniel Ray

ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY

for Isobel

 

You twitch

on the boundary of sleep:

a fox

running on all fours

snouting the gold-stuff

of its dreams.

 

A nightjar spurts its silver-

cogged voice mathematically.

How     do I divide

these moments?

I ask it.                        How

am I meant to package

time?

 

Still

the night's atoms

pinned to your left breast:

a black

rose,

 

your body its thorn,

 

the darkest star

on a bed of white.

 

Image: Sunguk Kim - Unsplash


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Daniel Ray

Daniel Ray's writing has been published in Griffith Review, The Big Issue Fiction Edition, Westerly, Island, Overland, Cordite, Voiceworks, Going Down Swinging, Sunder, The Suburban Review and Cicerone Journal’s anthology, These Strange Outcrops. His Honours thesis was awarded the 2023 ANU Gender Institute Prize. He was shortlisted for the 2023 and 2024 Griffith Review Emerging Voices Competitions and is the recipient of the 2024 Faber Academy Writing a Novel Online Scholarship, where he is developing his debut novel, supported by a Create NSW Grant. He is a 2024 Varuna Writer's Space Online Fellow and a 2024 Varuna Roderick Centre Fellow.

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