Refractions

I did not live in rainbows but

kaleidoscopes.

I dreamt in single colors:

blue like the sheen of his skin,

mist that hung among the treetops

in winter. Red on brown,

my lipstick against her collarbone,

the dry heat of California’s freeways

and the neon ache of its

nights. She bleached my hair

and then I looked like my mother,

same dark brow under blonde curls.

When we argued, my father said

I reminded him of his father,

stubborn as the desert.

//

My grandmother, Ivis,

Ivy—green like the spine of the forest,

like algae blooms in sleeping lakes—

loved to paint women with

red hair. There were none in our family.

We were dark white women,

light brown women.

We changed color with the seasons,

my sister and I, burnt dark

in childhood summers, glowing pale

as our mother by February.

I was called a terrorist

in elementary school because of my name,

my so-called unibrow,

but on every questionnaire I’ve just

marked the box that said White,

thinking of my hands, my privilege,

my grandmothers.

//

I did not live in rainbows.

I drank from many-colored bottles,

clothed myself in marigold,

baby pink and cherry red, florals

like old tablecloths, faded as memories.

Nothing was ever a continuum,

a safe and easy blur from red to orange,

blue to indigo, everything

neatly placed in the spectrum.

I clashed, fell in love with a girl

I couldn’t save, a boy I didn’t need,

a man twice my age.

I wanted a husband and wife

at once, a polyamorous marriage

of burnt-orange and pale blue,

bodies colored by time, by separation

from the past, dead or forgotten

ancestors, prayers.

//

Spring I was pastels and winter

I was seasonal depression, gray

as the line of the horizon

or the entrails of a computer.

I would brew black coffee each day

wishing for an omen:

bright red of blood thinned by water,

deep green breath of a river.

I did not live in rainbows but

I was never monochrome for long,

never dull, only disastrous,

only seeking the source of color,

the places where rainbows are made:

in storms, in light so bright

it becomes.