CNF: Night Shift
by Amy Speace
My mother would throw open the curtains of our darkened yellow room singing, O what a beautiful morning!, the stabbing sun at high noon, a cheery scold as the house had been
moving for hours, alive as a corporation. I never saw the sunrise until I had a baby and then I saw every hour. At night she’d dress in her bridal peach nightgown, long gauze train, satin straps holding her to her vow, over sweatpants smeared with flour handprints. Curled under covers, my sister and I would squeal when she’d enter our room. She called herself the night nymph and would dance us off to sleep, while our father worked past dinner, past stories, past dreaming.
Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana/Folk singer and songwriter, discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won “International Song of the Year” from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother and Salon.com. Her debut collection of poetry, The Cardinals, will be published by Red Hen Press in Spring 2027. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Night Shift”? I can tell you this. Many of the poem in my collection deal with childhood memories and parenthood, marriage and divorce. There is a theme of my mother’s satin nightgown and my father not being home a lot because of work in different poems. “Night Shift” is a memory piece that started as tercets and I revised it many times using a few different forms. In the end, it seemed to land better in prose, as if the narrator was telling this memory in one breathless outpouring.
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Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
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