Free Verse
Black is Not a Color
I. The bossy kid with the runny nose two seats in front of me in the third grade was the first to break the news. It can’t be your favorite color. That doesn’t make sense. You have to pick something else. I picked it anyway, taking my marker with childish rebellion and shading my paper darker than dark. If it’s not a color why is it part of the box? I asked, but he was already complaining to the teacher about me. II. At twelve, I began to notice I could not hear myself in the shapes of the words people used to describe me, could not recognize myself in family pictures; my childhood wish to master the superpower of invisibility was granted, in the cruel way faery princes trick human children. for years, I searched for myself in the spaces between the words I read, curled up in an unlit room. I grew to cover myself in black, erasing the deceitful curves and uneasy lines of my adult body III. Eighteen, I will never forget the cave in Ireland where the tour guide told us it was very important to keep the lights on, because true black made people insane. For a second, he let the lights go to exemplify this, and my eyes lost purchase, the world spun. I was afraid but I was also free, my mismatched parts absorbing back into the dark: head of a woman, heart of a man, soul of neither. IV. the curve of someone’s body has never made me stir, even when my neighbors’ gardens were shot through with little red buds of desire, for touching and sucking that made my stomach turn. I thought they were lying when they told me I had something missing; no matter how my fingers groped I could not find the hole. V. my heart has never sped at the thought of another person; I have never craved the presence of another body beside me upon waking. They say this means I must be lonely, that I just don’t know what love is. but sometimes when I stay up past dark on the roof with my sister, sometimes when I walk alone on the street and watch the lights go out one by one, when the rich dark slant of a chord of faraway music hits too close to the bone and fills me to the brim, I know that they are wrong. VI. Thirty-two, in June, I travel freshly tarred streets the same inky hue as my boots, walking through rainbow banners, the smell of air after rain, the sounds of celebration buzzing through me, filling me with something like kinship, like hope. If the people dotting the streets in one another’s arms can be accepted for who they are, maybe someday I can be forgiven for who I am not.
By Raistlin Allen5 years ago in Poets
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By Denise Larkin6 years ago in Poets
