poetry 2016 / 100

Last Hurrah

remember the party in '85
when we'd finished our foundation course
and had mixed drinks in the palisade
of the college atrium?
A quiet affair more suited
to the sticklers of authority
kowtowing to bureaucratic bosses
more concerned with how many than how well?
Where multi-hued canvasses
graced free-standing display boards
rough pine frames against sugar-paper walls
and your record player, spindle up for repeat,
playing Adagio over and over.
Bored and nowhere near drunk
we drove to Woodfield, where the textiles girl –
was her name Nikki? – rented studios
and we partied until dawn
when your lips still held a trace of vodka
and my stockings fluttered;
the legs of a ghost on the pre-dawn breeze
yellow-jacketed from the sodium-vapour lamps
of a deserted flyover

© Rachel Green 2016

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