A fingernail of moon is scratching at the curtain, which is closed like a border to the low-hanging night. Yet lamplight splays like the sun on her face. She begins to dance like a child, a body pulled out of itself, surprised how it moves, arching backwards, shoulders that crest and trough, that coil like rope.
Bronwyn Hansen
She laughs at her shadow, dancing with her, cast like a Brocken spectre on the wall. I catch my own, huge, and we balloon into darkness, our penumbras
blur into dreams and six feet apart, too far to embrace our shadows clasp and we feel a synesthetic closeness, an imagined touch as those shapes coalesce.
We are muscle and bone thinned to paper, shadow carved into brickwork. I fear you are still just a trick of the light, from screen to wall and maybe back again.
And somewhere, under different skies, where professors don’t lecture to empty seats, those pale imitations might peel away, dance noiseless down corridors made for screaming, skin fused
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Bronwyn Hansen
