the night has a heart and it is hungry

which is why you keep thinking about mouths, though ears is the word we give to wheat. who is to judge an appetite? the wheat field draws you into its furious murmur, as though something so large must announce itself. as though the need to swallow swallows even pride. it is a sea of fingers pointing to God, but you are not Moses; without conviction, the safe gleam of a prayer. you continue toward the dawn, or at least the likeness of it. if there was a map it is no longer. If there was a you it is no longer. only the body you walk in and the open sky, the dark alive and scenting blood. perhaps you should have listened to the villagers. they say we know what lives in the ground and it knows that we know. they say the night has a heart, I’ve seen it. what glow have you been following, and does it mean you harm? it hovers ahead over the tops of the wheat, seeming to speak a promise. wherever you are going feels suddenly remote. there is no need for home when you are here — wrapped in this great noise, snared by that beam. let others escape the maw. you could become the teeth.

Anuja Mitra

Anuja Mitra lives in Auckland and is co-founder of the online arts mag Oscen. She has writing published or forthcoming in Signals, Starling, The Three Lamps, Mayhem, Poetry NZ and Cordite, as well as Sweet Mammalian Issues 5 and 6, though possibly her finest work remains unfinished in the Notes app of her phone.