Light as a foal you’re clinging on, engine roaring, heart thumping, flying across fields of scorched sunflowers, stubbles of corn, skidding on baked orange earth, the handlebars of your moped rearing up like a crazy horse, and recklessly out of tune you’re belting out a medley of Beatles’ songs, each of you knowing all of the words to “Ticket to Ride,” “Love Me Do,” “Here Comes the Sun,” despite despising phony John, who imagines no possessions but possesses a climate-controlled penthouse to house Yoko’s furs; and after arriving at Le Vieux Port bar, a throng of beat-up Mobylettes abandoned outside, twenty drunk couriers wildly cheer each time someone orders a fresh round of formidables, and soon all of you are naked, thrashing around in the pool and someone shouting trash the tents, then dancing, flailing on top of a flimsy roof until the poles buckle and snap and in a thrilling tangle of limbs, you’re collapsing onto the ground, where spread out before you like a billowing canvas is that unfailing sense of being young.

Jane Salmons

is from Stourbridge in the UK. Her first poetry pamphlet, Enter GHOST, was published by dancing girl press in 2022. Her debut poetry collection, The Quiet Spy, was published by Pindrop Press, also in 2022.

Jane has micro and flash fiction stories published with MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Ekphrastic Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, and in the Ad Hoc Fiction anthologies Dandelion Years and Flash Fiction Festival Five; and forthcoming in The Dribble Drabble Review. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, and nominated for Best Microfiction 2023 and Best of the Net 2024. Her story Miracle Grow won the Pokrass Prize at the Bath Flash Fiction Festival held in 2022.

Author’s website: https://www.janesalmonspoetry.co.uk

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ The Weightlessness of Love, ekphrastic microfiction by Jane Salmons in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 12, March 2022); nominated by MacQ for the Best Microfiction 2023 anthology.

⚡ Passengers, ekphrastic microfiction by Jane Salmons, in Starry, Starry Night: An ekphrastic anthology inspired by Van Gogh’s masterpiece, published by The Ekphrastic Review (25 February 2022)