Chase Gagnon

Longest Night

In a tattered shanty on Superior’s frozen crust I toss my line into a dark hole, baited with moonlight on a worm’s back . . . and nothing more. As sleep lulls me to its warm cottage, this strange darkness pulls the fetus of a dream from my fingertips, then subsides, as if the sole purpose of its nibbling was to abort a vision that might have changed my life. I pull up the line to find only a chunk of the worm remains. But it’s still enough to send back down.

winter solstice
I suck a pearl of blood
from my thumb