Pink Light

It was the pink light falling from the club’s lamp onto the woman’s face that made her look aglow, and it was the slow, then fast-fast movements and undulations in her voice, other-worldly, that made the room and everyone in it think of a baby that needed to be fed, her baby, and the umph of that new-born’s voice rose up to the ceiling, chaotic, persistent. The beauty was in the woman’s heartbeat as she gave birth to this music, the double-bass and double meaning of the song about blood running thicker than water, doleful and despondent, the broodiness of the chords, the collision of colours which shattered the normality of the everyday. This long-ago blue in her voice made the audience feel things they didn’t understand.

Dizzy Fizz

The would-be guests thought of canapés and the dizzy fizz following the pop of the cork, the congratulatory rise and fall of everything but the couple didn’t marry after four jam sessions and a baby. There was so much to be said between the three, but now there were just two, and the improvisation of love-and-leave-me. She carried on singing at the club, with the baby in a cot backstage, its feet rosy, its face sharp and sweet in sleep. Saxophone honey dripping, the owner of the club wooed her and woozily she said Yes, Yes.

Up, Down, Years

Jazz up and down her spine, she told me. Up and down. I longed for my real father with jazz up and down my spine. Many years later she told me he was the drummer. Many years. She told me. My real father. I longed for.

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Nora Nadjarian is a poet and fiction writer from Cyprus. She was a finalist in the Mslexia poetry competition 2021 and her work has been published, among others, in Poetry International, The Interpreter’s House, Magma, and Perverse. Her collection Iktsuarpok is available from Broken Sleep Books.