Behind the orange airplane seats we dip
our heads, you part your mask so I can kiss you
on the cheek, such illicit love in these new
clean days of ours. Your mask is cheap cloth
with gilded detail from Klimt’s The Kiss
spilling in Tetris down your face.
Your eyes fleck with its gold, rimmed
with those sudden black edges that I would feel
towards in the dark of night when we’d been
surrounded too long by white walls.
My mask is a new pink horizon, I look
down more than out nowadays. The brink
of our world is blurred, we are all explorers
spinning out flat-earth theories with no real idea
of what lies beyond that new arc of sky.
First published in An Orchestra of Unexpected Sounds (2020), Good Chance
Emily Webb 