Pete Dunstone
Played by Heart
She wonders about my gender leanings, but I’m not saying. She thinks I don’t get out enough and wants me to meet a friend of hers who plays a mellow sax on the Holloway Road.
She’s a dancer who likes to make moves of the modern kind, so we dive on down the Piccadilly Line, laugh at her rumba and disco swooshing the floor with the turns. In a screeching of train wheels and judder, pirouettes go plié, her grand jeté glued to the floor.
Wrapping us in clouds of air kisses and jazz radiance he sweeps us into his shop, the windows all whitewashed and scratched with radical prose “From all the wild parties,” she whispers between sips of tea with the jasmine notes and scones melting buttermilk inside us with his saxophone tones. Blowing twilight a welcome with indigo flows, long blues to soothe the whole earth.
old friends
winter stars filling the space
between us
About the Author
Pete Dunstone has had a fine art education and many different jobs, finally resting in horticulture. He likes plants, automata, woodworking, and birding in the UK’s Somerset Levels. His poems have appeared in Blithe Spirit, Ephemera, Kingfisher, Failed Haiku, cho, and The Haibun Journal.