The Beer Garden

I wrote this little flash at a Prose Poetry workshop as part of Cheltenham Poetry Festival.

They sit alone in the pub’s garden. The scuffed wooden slats scratch against the backs of her knees, her feet dangle high above the grass, air filling the space between the ground and her downward pointing toes. She looks through the gap between the two planks of wood of the bench. A shock of dandelion head pushes its way upwards. 

They repeat this ritual every other weekend. He, silent, with a beer warming in his hand. She, silent, with a Penguin bar melting sticky in its red wrapper. She takes her time to read the fact printed on the fraying plastic, memorising it to impress with later, her mouth silently shaping the words. 

He offers her the beer and she dips her finger in its froth, a ball of cuckoo-spit. It tastes brown. It tastes bitter.