Tag: Nonfiction

Autobiography in Color – flash memoir and poetry

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.

Rising Tide – Micro Memoir

In Newport, on the side of the road, my family pulled over to play by the sea. I took photos of the water with my little Instax Mini while my father in law watched my daughter. In an instant, the tide starts pouring in. I see my daughter alone on a jetty, my father in law nowhere nearby. I start calling to her to come back. She points to the water and starts to climb in to get back to me. She cannot swim. Frantic, I am sprinting toward her. The sea has claimed so much of me in my dreams. It will not take my daughter from me in what passes for real life

Getting Committed – a Micro Memoir

They took my bra because of the underwire. My breasts were free, but I was not. I couldn’t wear my sneakers from my husband because of the laces. And I could not bring in any of my pens to write poetry. They couldn’t let us have the things that made us comfortable or happy. We might kill ourselves, you know.