Neon Reverie

The suit wore him—too white, too new.  
A cigar flared; smoke curled in balcony air.  
Penthouse whispers steeped in carat gold;
his voice like opera—loud, aware.

We drifted down to F. Scott’s
jazz hung heavy in the air.  
His laughter thinned to smoke and glass,  
martini spills on borrowed flair.

I was fresh out of school—  
too young for his tired game,  
carrying shadows I couldn’t name.

A day later, his smoke still climbed.  
Two days on, the wind swept the city clean.

The Email

The inbox blinked.  
Summons I couldn’t ignore:  
papers are ready.  

One sentence split the room—  
the air went thin.  

I called for his voice;  
silence pressed cold  
against my skin.  

The phone clicked off.  

Grief rolled me  
in soundless thunder.  

A clarion call—  
calm, steady,  
threaded through the wire,  
cutting clean through fog:  
the storm subsided,  
a fragile shift  
between what I was  
and what I could be.  

In the hush that followed,  
I learned to breathe again.  

Each breath softer,  
each heartbeat mine

that mirror light in hue,  
and dance the Danube waltz again—  
my heart in time with you.

Mary Whitlow is a retired copy writer; radio commercial writer; newsletter editor; and graduate school paper writer.

Featured image: Andrzej Barabasz, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons