You, an ex-girlfriend,
sit a ruler’s length down the bench from your foil,
reciting the prescribed lines as you try
to extract the last two months from his eyes.
First date awkwardness is charged with final date
intimacy, exposed when you let yourself cry
and he reaches to stroke your hand, breaking
character.
You repay the favour,
pat his freshly-cropped hair as the escalator
carries him down to the wrong platform (incidentally yours)
and you think of Paradise Lost and Lucifer
hurtling from Heaven and how he never
read that book. But then again, neither did you,
and the comparison is too harsh anyway.
After Ella Frears∎
Words by Hope Nicholson. Artwork by Faye Song.
