Tipton Poetry Journal #34

Page 34

Tipton Poetry Journal

A Color a Man Can’t Be – Or, How to Cover Up Jeanette Beebe 1. The room where my mother grew up was orange: the walls, the carpet, and the furniture, too. As a girl, I tried to pull back the bottom drawer of the old oak dresser. The heavy thing slipped, and a knob snapped off. A dead hardness crumbled in my hand like a crayon. 2. Orange is a color of regret. This country is led by orange, an endless buffering: dyed orange, and kept orange, a dizzying alarm. 3. It’s orange still — no one has changed it back to whatever color blankness should be, like a child’s coloring books stored deep in a drawer, every page an outline, fragile, never filled in.

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