My neighbour irons nights at her first floor window

keeping one eye for Love Island, the other on me,

After 6 months she asked if I’d be buying curtains

with such conviction it sounded like

she’d witnessed something still to happen.

 

These unemployed years

she contents herself with the amusement of

someone gratefully retelling a witnessed car-crash,

logging my late night hours, remarking that

my tv still glows between pole & frame

and how, each time she gets up to relieve herself,

she thinks I must be a vampire.

Doubtless all the black doesn’t help.

 

Yet, yesterday I saw a girl so white

she blazed from the distance

a planning notice resonates,

cheek flesh the hardboiled hue of Cool Hand’s bet,

neck a counter slick of skimmed milk

butting two unsheathed reams of clavicles,

with a sternum of tripe pinned so tight

her cleavage shone like lid-clinging

home-brand, Greek yogurt,

limbs tapering into the sun,

ankles, wrists as Tippex bright

as her High Top toecaps.

 

But

 

no matter how much breath her

floating step, dancing hem

filleted from me,

I could not say a word,

for in the instant of eye-shift behind lens,

of lip-rise and drop again

I knew

that every kiss would leave her mauled

like a drowned girl in the morgue

been mapped for bruises.