Love in the End Times, What to Do with the Girl on the Dance Floor | Lydia Bennett

The pink hot light of your glance
Is enough to have me in hiccups.
Fitful grapefruits,
spaying from my dancing body.
I’d bite, but I know the bitterness
to be a fruit fly, that unsettles my appetite.

Love is my tired hat, grown musty from misuse
I hold it to my chest, a mark of respect
in a used-up game of cards, where all the players
left last Sunday. Become bus conductors
railway attendants for a heart
that will not cease to be unwieldy on its tracks.

To rekindle a flame takes seconds
just a wonky joke through yellowed teeth
to match my crow’s feet, match my mind
made current tea cake by a life lived feral.
Perhaps it was the glasses, they hid your eyes,
perhaps it was my hormones, chemical compounds

against me, telling me not to advance,
retreat, retreat, retreat. The beat a reminder,
to stay in the safety of yourself, don’t venture another soul.
But it’s not safety is it, its loss, it’s the chicken house
without the hens, when the fox
has stood sentry for too long.

Lydia Bennett is a poet and a mum of two sparkly-eyed children, and she finds the juggling of these two things often confusing! She has succeeded in coaxing her jumble of spaghetti words into nice, neat lines several times and has been published in Flash, Errant, and Gone Law. She lives in the green wonder-space that is the Yorkshire Dales and is thankful for it most days.