Budapest, August 20, 2021
by Theodora Goss

The fireworks
reached their fingers over the tops of the buildings,
making jazz hands
against the velvet curtains of the night,
red and green and white,
consummate performers accompanied
by a sound like bullets
and a halo of smoke,
as though playing at war
above lamplit streets that remembered
the last one, and the one before.

(The image is Nocture in Black and Gold by James MacNeil Whistler.)