A poem by Claire Booker, recalling a late-night walk with the moon through the back streets of London. Illustration by Mathieu Persan.

She trailed me three miles home
with her Geisha face, always one step ahead
as if drawn along

like a child’s balloon, descending
into the evening scent of linden, then darting to my left
as if she knew my every move.

Just for kicks, she scaled
tumescent cranes, glided through their box of tricks,
blew rings of softest apricot

to mask her curves, skipped
a row of trees, then dropped into a bedding shop,
left me standing jaundiced under neon.

But still she favoured me, swept back
radiant on a plane’s flume and when I chose to turn away,
scurried down a side alley,

re-emerged ahead, hanging
on staves of telegraph wire — an astonished semibreve.
Every slate and puddled gutter

became her slave that night;
laid their hopeful mirrors at her feet, where she conceived
herself as peacock of a thousand cracks of light.

She blazed so recklessly,
I saw men’s boot-prints studded in her flesh,
then vanished — drawing whole oceans from me.

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