luminous flux

by Helen Anderson

Tonight is a night

of brash resort neon’s surrender to a lemon moon

while red rivers of taillights rush away, below,

and this mountain on which I sit drips with unspent ink.

This is a night

for silent sips in passed-over corners – 

of strangers oversharing over vino rosado,

swapping doctored details as they weep goodbye.

Tonight

I jangle with warped renditions of tearjerker classics – 

scratch signs in needle piles with a blunt sandal toe – 

watch faces flicker in the glow of separate screens.

This is a night 

which clangs with frantic church bells, ripping

double-denim sea-sky – too fast, too many – 

before the valley settles to a gull’s single cry.

Tonight is a night

of Scots-Scouse-Spanish lilt merging into mellow –

for transcribing this almost-tune onto wavy staves

scribbled in the back of a blank pocket-planner.

Tonight

marks the debut of a makes-my-soul-sing sundress –

of shrugging off just-in-case cover-ups

and sitting comfortably in heat-bumped skin.

This is the night

for letting ants saunter, unsquashed, across my page –

for tormenting word-games to slip my mind,

and solving nothing to become the start of an answer.

Helen Anderson writes in a small coastal town in the North East of England. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Teesside University and her work has been published in literary magazines such as Confingo, Ellipsis, and StepAway. Author of ‘Piece by Piece: Remembering Georgina: A Mother’s Memoir’ (Slipway Press), her debut poetry pamphlet ‘Sagrada Familia’ is due to be published by Nine Pens Press. As a bereaved parent and a widow, Helen is fascinated by the therapeutic power of words.