A. Martine

NEVER WAS YOUR COLOR

It was a mistake after all to make the kitchen brighter.
All colors are known to lie, to prettify themselves 

for the occasion. I draw my knees up on the granite floor 
and against the windowed glass and have conversations

with the peach-swiped yellow wallpaper. I feign honesty. 
I am a woman who can talk about grief and write out 

that watercolored sadness I always brush my toes in. 
I swear: I am a woman who can look a curving road in 

the eye and say I know where this is going, I am a woman,
I have been here before. I can hold it together, come up 

against a freshly wallpapered kitchen. Can say: this was 
a mistake, no, don’t think wallpaper, don’t think yellow,

don’t think about that story, you know the one;
I am a woman who can say: no you are not like that 

protagonist with her sad life and almost mean it. Things 
come and go — time’s a nagger, checking in occasionally

(you still there, then?), green tea mug gets cold in hand,
petrichor gives way to a seabreeze kind of smell,

light makes its mad-dash way across the room, 
onetwothreefourfivesixseven o’clock, my outline shrinks 

and flickers before me, for a few hours, I am a giant 
in contrejour — but yellow walls and I, we go nowhere.

I am a woman who can hold it together hold it together 
hold it together. I need to learn other things 

with my hands that aren't picking and picking and 
picking apart. I heard dying felt like a flash, a burst,

life bottlenecked into a last huzzah. Somebody told me 
it’s a bend in the road you should outpace before 

it finds you unawares. I am lying. I know dying feels
like a flash, a burst, life bottlenecked,

and nobody told me this, I did. Anything, anything but
this slow exercise of a — where was this going?

It was a mistake to make the wallpaper yellow. Now 
my hands are full of it, the allegorical mistake

laid out like an exclamation on my fingertips. I am 
a woman who can look a curving, bending mind and say:

you know where this is going, go to bed, you can already 
hear the roar, you’ve had too good a couple of weeks.

And yellow? like that damned story, will pull you apart.
Never was your color — next time go at least for red.