I was 11. I had a neon orange shirt from The Limited Too and dayglo orange shorts from the same trendy tween store, and I paired them together. I was aware this was an unusual fashion choice, but my goal was to inhabit, inbibe, imbue myself with, and commune with the essense of orange and the God who created such a juicy ecstasy of a color.
My peers made unkind comments. I didn’t give a crap. They could not see what I could taste on my tongue……the sweet, sour, explosive energy that radiates from any bright, energetic shade of orange.
They didn’t speak my language. Around the girls I wore my face that I kept in a jar by the door. I knew who it was for.
In college I carried a vial of neon, sunshine, pure yellow beads from a craft store. I had moments where I needed to hang on to that tantalizing and holy color of orgasms and joy. I needed to understand yellow. Yellow is a country of her own. A country whose borders I perforated to access.
As a child I knew obsession in blue. Neurosis came to me and I would not accept less than a blueing of my private universe with grape purple on the edges.
Now I glow pink and place my permafrost heart in rows of pink yarn stretching like cables along the pink, plush landscape of my body, and of the inextricable boundaries of fulfillment and the feminine as a community application to sainthood. My sisters are bees who sleep in flowers my man gives me under borrowed starlight, sublime and polychromatic. The community fountain of wisdom is clogged with bleached hair and 21st century architecture. Pink is the warm color’s answer to blue. An impossible range of shades from warm to cool, from vivids to whip tints. Pink is a private planet of primordial femininity. A woman is a flower who blooms planted with the right man.
Beneath my eyes, an iridescent white flows from within my innermost chambers and I must confront how I sparkle and glow in so many colors and rhyme with the childlike joy of snow.
New Life
The languid, languishing ghost of ice ages past relinquishes her grip on the mountains, and I am terrified of what comes out to play when snow goes away. Children ask profound questions. What color is disappointment? (Beige, child) Children ask stupid questions. Why am I here? I suppose it’s not the question itself that’s stupid, but rather who you ask it to. I’m here because Valentine’s Day was just around the corner and my parents were too broke to go shopping. You might be here because an angel sneezed. All I know is the cold is opening like a grand doorway, and bursting forth is an alien life that shimmers green and pink in the haze of inexperienced summer.
Just the Right Universe
You are an old oak tree – I am but a swing designing patterns in the breeze from your strongest branch. The forest is alive with the yellow agreement of ants and the soft green buzz of bees. The sky wears blue like a badge of honor, but I saw it go to bed with a slatternly purple last night. Our child rocks on me. You support our weight. In another life you were a river, I a fishing pole languishing on an old man’s porch.
Theocracy of Granite
When the pain of my sinner’s shell is sufficient, I will shed it in a desert of my own making and grow a holy cathedral over my delicate glass body with the worn out, crimson heart. Sin scours the sands looking for beasts of burden to shackle. In the bottle of a glass of Holy Water, the egg of a dove kept perfectly warm. I was born to a theocracy of granite in a land as old as rebellion. There I will return to lay my crystal foundation.
Burning Hymns
Dauntless, I descend into the dark wine cellar of human identity and its limits. If you wait for winter to find you, sleep will never come. Trees know this and draw winter up from their deep roots. This is an exchange. I am a reflection of shared maniacal vision, and the one burning hymns into my face with a magnifying glass is God.
Coming Out of Depression
Radiant sunshine, why do you despair in corners, your wounds putrid and bound by stolen cobwebs? The typhoons of life cannot banish you like a future degraded people, underground. The moon is writing sonnets to comets, but the sun burns in agony to see you brought so low. Release the beams of waxy brightness, and glow.
Dance
Hot pink arrows glow and show the way to the ravine of raves in the orchard of my 71st year. What futuristic ballet will require us to register to feel the wind on our backs, and then bend us until our change falls out? Anachronistic society still wears gleeful republic garb, but inside parasitic politicians patrol the boundaries of the public body. I will dance or I will be damned. God, in his suit of 4 leaf clovers and purple legacy, gave me a song with my name engraved inside.
What More Does Destiny Desire?
The white west wind knows me like a sister. I am a debutante among daffodils. I am an undulating plane of pretty, pastoral landscapes of Navy lakes and hereditary hillocks. Incensed by intergalactic incense, I find matter droll. The west wind wiles away the day with a crochet hook and a lighter. Opportunity doesn’t knock. It bites you in the back with fangs like a spider until you grab it and look into its avid eyes. My lakes have primordial women swimming in them. My hillocks are illicit and vast. What more does Destiny desire?
A Woman Bound
Waltzing across a wide and withered world, I flounce my skirts of tulle and starlight. I’m a claimed woman, his name sewn in flannel on the outskirts of my pink existence. My boundaries are purple and regal as an empire’s final sunset. My man’s hands are dinosaurs – viscerally fantastic and dangerous. When he prowls through the lairs of seamonsters to find me a pure pearl of wisdom to shine on my neck, the sea reflects the moon and his eyes watching my body like a specimen of clutchable cloud. What does it mean to be a woman unbound? She is in her mortal state, that woman, wearing a tapestry of outgoing tide and longing. My name was once a lonely thing. Now it’s complete, and my God of orange and expertise calls me by that moniker.
Hunting Hauntingly
Take my life and let it be a strand of pearls around the neck of the strongest shark in this reef of rainbows and diamonds. My spirit leaks a little. He asks if I’m crying. I am not. My name, however, is weeping with shame. Take my life and let it be yours. When he throws my love letters in the air, they explode in pink and blue like fireworks. By the reef’s edge, predators hunting hauntingly.
Miniature Moon 