Conjunctions: 72 / Nocturnals

Spring 2019

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Bar at Twilight
Frederic Tuten

Nineteenth-Century Nights and Nocturnal Lights
Cecily Parks

In Dreams
Brian Evenson

Nocturne
Anne Waldman

Twelve Hours
Sallie Tisdale

As Mica Means Crumb, and Galaxy, Milk
Sarah Gridley

Psi, Phi, Omega
James Morrow

Haunt
Carmen Maria Machado

Ship of State
Peter Gizzi

Prey Ethics
Erika Howsare

Lux
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

The House at the End of the Night
Steven Potter

George Shiras: The Heart Is the Dark
Cole Swensen

Nights in the Asyntactical World
Ann Lauterbach

Dutch Kills
Han Ong

The Blue Hour
Raven Leilani

Walking in the Dark
Kathryn Davis

Ten Poems
Translated by Daniele Pantano and Robert Walser

Four Night Poems
Martha Ronk

One-Eyed Jack
Rick Moody

A Nightmare
Bennett Sims

Saving the Monster of Kowloon
Rita Chang-Eppig

In the Next Night
Gillian Conoley

Anosognosia
Paul Park

Nightgrief
Joyce Carol Oates

Night Watch
G. C. Waldrep

Four Nights
Elizabeth Robinson

Nocturne
Danielle Dutton

Your Wilderness Is Not Permanent
Sejal Shah

Cosmos, A Nocturne
Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Two Poems
James McCorkle

Solstice Night
Carole Maso

Neighbor
Daniel Torday

Four Poems
Laynie Browne

Nycticorax Nycticorax
Bin Ramke

Them
William Hicks

A Scribe from the Double-House of Life
Heather Altfeld

Description

Conjunctions: 72, Nocturnals

Edited by Bradford Morrow

Cover art by James Arthur O’Connor: Two Figures in a Moonlit Landscape, oil on canvas, 1792–1841, courtesy of James Adam & Sons.

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Night shrouds, but also illuminates. It is a time of meditation and celebration, but also of madness and grief. Nighttime is marked by loss and soul-searching, sweet dreams and grisly nightmares. Whether under a full moon or new, the night is a time of prayer and murder, of love, hate, and epiphany. A cascade of contradictories, night is sometimes restful, sometimes restive. Dread, loneliness, and dislocation are often intensified in the darkness of night, but the mind may also be set free during the hours in which Edgar Allan Poe’s “sable divinity” reigns. Whether awake or asleep, we spend half our lives during the night, lives that are often very different during the day.

In this Nocturnals issue of Conjunctions, readers will encounter the fearful monster of Kowloon, which, like many such monsters, relies on the dauntless imaginations of children in order to continue to exist. In a debut story, we follow the fates of three men on a hallucinatory journey into the snowy pitch-dark night of the soul. Like werewolves and vampires, ghosts are classic—chimerical?—denizens of the night, and they too haunt these pages. Purgatory can be found here, along with alternative universes, an East Village bar that doubles as a portal to another life, and a personal chronicle of a visit to Burning Man in Black Rock Desert. The nightbird Nycticorax is invoked in this issue, as are musical nocturnes, night thoughts at solstice, wheeling galaxies, and the cosmos itself. The pioneering nocturnal photography of George Shiras is celebrated in these pages, even as the dichotomous world of night versus day in equatorial Uganda is observed by an ethnographic eye.

In order to sustain her life, Scheherazade spun her stories for a thousand and one nights. In a spirit that recognizes how vital it is to voice our own stories, these fictions, poems, essays, and memoirs in Nocturnals address the myriad ways in which the night, from dusk to daybreak, is central to our experience of life.