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110 · Mar 2020
The Vaudevillian Flapper
Sander Mar 2020
A piano glissando started the jazz

There she was, the flapper,
She flew on her crooked dancing heels,
Tweeted a light hedonistic tune,
Her airy short fringed gown
Exposed her rouged knees and her naked thighs

A feather boa crawled on her pallid collar bones,
Her heels tapped on the snake’s every slither

The taste of whiskey masked the flavour of her
promiscuity,
A scandal
The scent of morphine wafted around her,
A mirror to her unsettled hoedown

The flapper’s onyx bob,
Embellished with vibrant ostrich plumes
Her hair’s band,
Glittered with sequins and diamantes

Cigarette incense framed her,
clouded the marquee background
Soft lilac light embraced the musical band
But the spotlight was hers

Jazz and drink,
The ingredients for her burlesque conduct

The laughs of audience members
Chorused with her haughty charleston

The trombone climaxed
The cymbals crashed

Her dance was dying
Along with the grins of men clad in black

and on her last step,
The night dissolved
63 · Mar 2020
The Grove
Sander Mar 2020
In thickets and weeds unknown
of bracken outcrops
under the pollen-freckled cheeks of pine
lay the grove

sewn shut.
still.
reminiscing in slumber-
the memories of his skin

pallid then and pallid now
held warmth then yet frosted now
ever-changing
under the pollen-freckled cheeks of pine
lay the grove

— The End —