The professions of dentistry and real estate torment me from just around the corner. I misspell generator as genderator. Feel wholly ghostly in your presence. Rehomed pets come back to haunt as I gnaw on a chicken carcass. My hindsight is not 20/20. I am thinking of the whisper of a gravel road and horses way up on the hill. Our shadows long in the mild winter sun. The swelling of the darkness makes me uneasy. I wither underneath pleated street lamps and hospital ceilings. Don’t remember ever being this afraid of the night.

Elliot Harley McKenzie is a queer pākehā poet living in Tāmaki Makaurau | Auckland. Other places they have been published include Starling, NZ Poetry Shelf, Takahē, Turbine, Tarot and Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems.