The Local History of Darkness

Roosters invented noise, not the rising of the sun. Which is more than most folks around here have done.
Little ghost towns like ours dread mornings. Everybody sleeps in. We ignore the light hitting our eyes 
until it’s about to ignite our scarecrow heads and the leaning, unhinged barns we call our homes upright 
themselves again good as new — like so many giant red flowers. Some days that’s almost noon. Or after. 
The area hills creak under our dead weight as we stagger to the work we’ll leave undone for another day. 
There’s a breeze occasionally, but it’s never enough to blow anybody away.








Brian Beatty's essays, jokes, poems and stories have appeared in numerous print and online publications, including Bark, Conduit, elimae, The Evergreen Review, Exquisite Corpse, Gulf Coast, Heavy Feather Review, Juked, Lake Country Journal, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and Quarterly Concern, The Moth, Mountain Gazette, Opium, Paper Darts, Phoebe, Publishers Weekly, The Quarterly, Rain Taxi, The Rake and Seventeen. His humor collection DUCK! was published in 2009. Ravenna Press will be publishing his poetry chapbook Earliest Bird Calls in February 2013. Brian also produces the monthly literary podcast “You Are Hear” at mnartists.org, a joint project of The Walker Art Center and The McKnight Foundation.