Camo

As a child, my name, Freesia, would get mistaken

for Fuchsia. And before I was born, they’d decided

colors, too, had genders—and would place me

on the tolled road among coral and peach,

bubblegum and magenta. At the time,

I was wearing dresses every day, disliking

the constriction of pants, their inseams and elastic,

silver buttons squeezed through navy buttonholes.

When I turned ten, someone bought me a doll

in a dusty rose wedding gown so pale, nearly fading,

she almost belonged in the buttercream cake of a dream.

Someone bought me a notebook where I started to write

about the boys who claimed my dress was see-through

and thought it funny, which made me want to escape

gender’s gated gardens for the first time,

so in fourth grade, I asserted my new favorite color

was green—the tone of so many fetching things:

limes and summer leaves, sour apple

candies and my mother’s shapeshifting eyes.

I wanted space

from the primary expectation of pink, despite its closeness

to red, a color I now suppose we thought of as nonbinary

without the term, discussing how it was neither

a boy nor girl

color from the corner of the playground.

I loved forest green especially in its mystery

and opaqueness, a hue one could nearly hide behind,

and Kelly green, so saturated and excitable

I thought it would help me fly. I even liked the color

of the pond at Jackson Park, chartreuse, almost yellow,

choked of oxygen by floating algae and Canadian geese,

and what I called the “plain green” of eight-pack crayons

and markers in the plastic tub at my dad’s house where we drew

elaborate maps on butcher paper bigger than my school desk

on Saturday afternoons. I began

to think of myself as a maker, that green could help me

grow roots of my choosing, an ink through which

I could make my mark as a girl on my own.

And I loved turquoise, reminding me of the ocean

I’d seen once in Boston,

blush jellyfish pulsing beneath the boardwalk

before we started driving back to Wisconsin

and broke down in Ohio, marooned for some days

as we waited for a new part to fix our rusty silver van.

I remember the motel in that small town

sinking back into hedgerow and forest,

the green of our unexpected late August vacation

when we were already supposed to be back at school.

But I felt happy to be stuck in Ohio with my sister

and our father, far away from the responsibility

of the other students I answered to. I thought of this shelter

again, years later, at the army surplus store

in my hometown, where I didn’t buy anything at the beginning

of a war we would protest even after I became

an adult in mourning for the gendered dead and wounded

on all sides. But I was curious, I lingered as I felt of a piece

among all that green again, camouflaged like a fawn

or a mouse between the cotton jackets and cargo pants

hanging from racks suspended from the ceiling,

alone there, a hideout from which I couldn’t be teased.

In that dark forest, I felt like the other girls

walking the avenue outside in their bright fox fineries

would never see me or demand I name another favorite anything,

though maybe they’d think my name was Fuchsia

if they thought of me at all, and maybe that would make me

just different enough to be interesting.