Northern Lights He said aurora – I imagined flowers, but we weren’t lodged in dreams; embarked on the haze of my ginger hair , he told me he had been a sailor – how he flew over the seas on his ships. The man in the suit sailed on rockets, metal ships sturdy like success – inventions of chemicals a lady wasn’t expected to know; they impressed like the skins of paints on what they believed was my mind’s petite canvas. Someone had discovered rebellious uses of jelly, liquid that burnt; thick songs blew from the sideways juke, much like how every radio departed from the real story of the woman in red with three strange men; the starlight outside dancing to mellow tunes of a romance selling tickets as appeasement, as distraction, as insistence, as a memory that meant to outlive trenches – men in uniforms, bodies dressed in flags. I was looking at him sitting adjacently distant, his eyes buried under his hat but his gaze: mesmerising wit. He knew how the lights rose far-east like sashaying time, how my knowing of fugitives was no coincidence – rugged word for my pretty mind – and the story of the lovers making large screens blush, ache and forge, the aura was exotic – entangled in a mix of trust and faith. Someone today ripped metal wings through morale – victory and baggage. Tonight I sat in safe lights of warm topaz; my skin glowing like a goddess, unaffected by far-audible stifles of howling ghosts, our country undefeated, and I unbothered but about the mystery of mobius ribbons swirling stars delicately like ballerinas on poles; his gaze unlifting as his neck pointed towards north; close your eyes, he seemed to gesture, imagine the dance of conquest – souls fled too soon – the lights: waves of open arms; look into the night, starless and fiery, but lit and calm. First published in Ekphrastic Challenge for Nighthawks by Edward Hopper