Night Shift Psalms

By Quari Editions

Poems from the Hours the Day Forgets

A spare lyric collection set entirely within the overnight hours of a small New England city — call it something like Pittsfield or Woonsocket, a place with a closed mill and a still-open Sunoco. The poems move through the fluorescent stations of the night economy: gas pumps, hospital corridors, the last bus route, a diner counter, a laundromat at 3 a.m. The speaker is present but not omniscient — a witness who works these hours or cannot sleep, who knows the overnight workers by their postures and their badge-clips but not always their names. The collection argues that the hours between midnight and first light constitute their own country, with its own citizens, its own liturgy, and its own kind of grace that the daylight economy neither sees nor counts.

She counts it before he asks. Three quarters, two dimes, a nickel. The hand-off low, palm to palm, no eye contact — that is the contract. What passes between them is not kindness, exactly. It is the other thing: the knowledge that this hour requires a different name for it.