Dark Walking

The sodium glow of the horizon eradicates the stars on the night we sneak out. Wooden posts will not yield to thumbtacks and I blister. The children were to be poetry fairies, dusting laminated rhyme

The sodium glow of the horizon
eradicates the stars
on the night we sneak out.

Wooden posts will not yield
to thumbtacks and I blister.
The children were to be poetry
fairies, dusting laminated rhyme
on an incarcerated village,
an attempt to lift the curse,
eviscerate the dragon
but they argue loudly, stumble,
wake a baby.

My torch dies. Ten miles away a
friend’s father lies prone, hospital
gown gaped to betray a back
heaving with machined breath.
Ten thousand miles and the pyres
heave with bodies, liquefying orange
against the night’s edge.

We stop, inhale, watch a bat
sweep the above. The only living thing
but us. We name him Bob.

KE Morash is a playwright and poet from Nova Scotia, now living in the UK. Her writing has received prizes and been published in Spelt, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Songs of Love & Strength; Live Canon Anthology 2019 and 2018; Room; Understorey; Literary Mama; Sentinel Literary Quarterly; Bare Fiction; and QWF, amongst others.