Purism by Vona Groarke The wind orchestrates its theme of loneliness and the rain has too much glitter in it, yes. They are like words, the wrong ones, insisting I listen to sense. But I too am obstinate. I have white walls, white curtained windows. What need have I of the night's jet-black, outlandish ornament? What I am after is silence in proportion to desire, the way music plumbs its surfaces as straight words do the air between them. I begin to learn the simple thing burning through to an impulse at once lovely and given to love that will not be refused.

Night

by Carsten René Nielsen
translated by David Keplinger 

At night things become ever so smaller, our shoes and teeth, too, and everywhere in buildings screws turn a quarter of a revolution, but even if you press your ear against the wall, the sound is rarely heard. Always there is someone who plays the gelatin piano, someone who packs his pipe with snow, and on a radio channel from somewhere in the world, where the sun is already on its way up through the mist in the horizon: a gospel choir of hoarse, nearly inaudible women.