All Stood Together Poem - Flax010

He said they’d meet outside the Odeon but he never came. Eventually, they boarded

it up. She refused go home. I don’t know where she went at night or what she did for food. Her best coat grew tattered. We swapped rumours: he meant to take her past the stone barricades and show her the colour of the sky as it really was, behind the slate bubble they’d put up to hide us from the smog. In time the demolition crews grew nearer and someone sent a van to take her away. She wouldn’t answer – just looked over their shoulders into rubble she didn’t see, still expecting him to come.

I asked them to wait, borrowed a suit and a pair of bolt cutters, and took her into

the cinema. The black velvet on the seats was rotted through but we were all there in our best clothes to surround her with a pink fume of remembered kisses in an almost private darkness. We took turns holding her hand and although the bulldozers drowned out the soundtrack, we watched the exotic colours of grass and sky we had never seen. I think it was an advertisement for fabric softener.

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All Stood Up Together, Jenn Ashworth

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