Chapbook. Poetry.
5.5” x 8.5”
32 pp.
Printed on vintage Eagle A Bond paper.
Cover variants in assorted colors.
Hand-stamped with the official seal of Illicit Zines.

Slip on the Ski Mask of Night starts with a List of Demands, asking “for everything / and more,” and doesn’t let up from there—in a job interview with the moon, incredulously some suit asks “umm, it says under employment... poet?” That’s right, now slip on the ski mask of night and go to not work—night knows the real work is living against this. Grab your weapons—truth, memory, mixtapes, a 36-minute kiss, the moon, the desire to be left wrecked by desire—to draw a door in the mountain of suffering as a way to escape, as an invitation:

come
                        let’s walk
                        together 
                        through the dark

Night is more than a book, it’s a prayer in the shape of a knife, a survival guide to whatever this shit is—night knows a way to be at home in the dark, like the stars, like us, shining and shit. It’s an ethos, a map of desire, a brick at a protest, a “cosmic commons,” and like any revolutionary act, it’s made in collaboration with friends, with cover art and comic drawing stylings by artist & poet Mark He. The two poets hatched a plan together after crashing a corporate conference room at night scattered with ski masks, hand-written poems, underground comics, wine, and a whiteboard, complete with characters from the poems—the museum of the moon, some soil from Pittsboro, a coyote on a cliff— like police sketches of the Night’s Most Wanted. 

Night also breaks out of this book into the real, with blue-green stitched NIGHT sewn into a black Ski Mask studded with diamond stars, roses and lilacs embroidered into the neck of Night by poet & artist Madeleine Barnes, who allows Night herself to speak through a series of cut-out paper letterings, lines, lyrics, incantations, demands, and spells. There’s even a cameo by her cats Tux & Rams, who too demand all the animals and people be set free!