When did you come
to this conclusion? Rectified
in the backroom, with basement bargain deals:
did her dresses drip
through your tongue, commentary milky
and fresh? Swimming, as she did, in a blood-sea
of polka-dots, and oceans of trim, moldy
tones, sky-slop, shades difficult to name—and up against
some slanted olive stripes, almost charming, like high
school pick-up lines.
Was the stick-
er orange, or written in permanent
ink: a sinking
bluish black, slightly
bleeding around the edges—subtly pungent
like a concocted drench of middle school locker rooms and
aunt Erma’s oatmeal-raisin attic cookies, smelling sweet
but tasting, sharp, of mothballs
—75 percentoff?
(Because no one
would ever
buy it
otherwise.) Was she alone
in her disbelief? Or was her mother there
insisting, of course, upon grandbabies already? And Oh,
yes, he’s right: green is your color.
