Paint Chip Poetry

(A/N: The following haikus were based off two separate, orange and a blue tone, paint swatches.)

Orchards

Sunny fruits harvest,

Oranges, nectarine, peach,

Ripe for the taking.

Discovery

Contemplate yourself,

Get lost in those pensive skies,

Do your soul seeking. 

(A/N The following acrostic poem was based on the color swatch Soft Suede. The theme was derived from classic mobsters and their suede fashion, but I decided to drive a more modern spin on the term "gangster" by focusing on the Los Angeles Latinx gang rivalries.)

Gangster

Slicked back hair, loud dogs, gold grills, tattoos on their faces and necks,

Old to new ways, the gangsters traded in their suede for chains,

Flask half full of mind warping liquor, a worm swims in its depths, a joint is passed between their teeth,

Track marks dotting their mother's arms, 

Sour faces and boiling blood, their culture bonds them as a family,

Upkeep their reputation, break fingers to settle debts,

East side represent, selling dope to Suburbia, 

Dead bodies dumped in the allies as a warning to the other crews,

Eternal pride to their lord. 

(A/N: The following free verse poem was based on a green color palette. While the colors bear royal names like Emerald Shore and Island Time the shades themselves are not vibrant at all - they're either very dark or hazy - it's deceptive. So this poem describes a place that is not what it seems, and therefor derives its name from two deceitful sources: a mirage being a hallucination, and the lotus being infamous in Greek legend for trapping people in time.)

Lotus Mirage 

Time on the island ticked by in an unnatural fashion, but no one complained,

We spent every long day on the beach, splashing in the waves,

Everyone proclaimed Lotus Oasis was the place to be,

My family were on their knees begging for a visit,

When our week on the island drudged on for what felt like a month, 

I began to tire of the sun,

But I wished that I had appreciated it more when it vanished behind the clouds,

A tropical storm that no one had predicted was quickly approaching,

The only road off the island was backed up because of the rain,

I stared out the window at the beach while our car sat still in the line of traffic,

The drizzle glazed the sand over like glass, 

The normally blue bay waters had morphed into a pale, brothy puddle that crashed against the emerald shores like a spirit clawing its way from the other world,

Time passed unnaturally on the island, but as we watched the bodies crawl from the water, I wished that we'd never visited. 

(A/N The following Narrative is about scorn and uncertainty. The color it was based off was called Anchors Aweigh and can only be described as the deepest shade of purple you can reach before crossing over to black.)

Anchored

That morning on the docks, he promised that he'd return to me,

The way he smiled under that Navy cap squeezed my heart enough to believe him, but not enough to dry my tears while I watched his ship leave the port.

We knew we were battling cliches, a young couple separated by war,

One of us was bound to be unfaithful to the other,

But I was naive to think us stronger,

Months ticked by, ships came and went from the docks, but never with my love,

So many days passed that I lost the motivation to go look for him,

I started to forget what his smile looked like,

I remember passing by a news stand, and seeing in the papers that the war was over, I flipped his engagement ring around in my palm as I stared at the front page picture,

"Well if the war doesn't kill him," I couldn't help but think, as I dropped the silver into the dirt, "He'd better be dead before he comes back to this town."

Undercurrent (Object Inspired Writing)

(A/N this piece was inspired by a shell passed around in my Creative Writing class. Word count: 1004.)

            The drive had been a long one – Mallory and I fought most of the way – luckily her anger subsided a few state lines back. I glanced in the rear view mirror at my young daughter, Ana, her chubby face scrunched by her safety restraints, and then to my wife asleep in the seat beside me. My grip on the steering wheel tightened. If it weren’t for our child, she probably would have left me for even trying to move her away from the West Coast.

            When we drove by the sign that signaled we were exiting New Hampshire, I knew we were close to our new home; a better home for our daughter in the small, port town of South Hill, Maine. The sound of Ana sucking hungrily on her sippy cup jolted me from my day dreams, and the rest of the ride flew by as I flipped through tracks on a Disney CD trying to entertain her.

            Mallory awoke just as we were pulling into the new neighborhood. All of the houses were small, but rustic and shore side. As her eyes landed on the thick morning fog over the ocean, I heard a small gasp escape her lips and for once in the entire trip she looked enthusiastic about the change. I smiled too, as I prayed for my family to thrive here.

            A few days went by, and as we got settled into our home the community embraced us with whole hearts. Mallory befriended a younger woman in the neighborhood who agreed to watch Ana during the day. I got a job at the shipment docks. It was brute labor, but the guys I worked with made the time fly by. The three of us had never been this functional in California. It was a 180 change for the better.

            Once autumn turned the corner, my wife and my roles switched for a while. Mallory taught first grade; so she was busy setting up things for her classroom. This meant that I was the one who would get Ana ready in the morning for the sitters.

            I remember that it was a foggy morning – much like when we’d first moved-and as I looked to Ana in the rear view mirror I had a small case of déjà vu of that day. Her purple coat hood was pulled up over her head, and she was playing with a matching plastic pail in her lap. Her sitter had told me the day before that she was planning on taking the kids for a walk on the beach. Ana loved collecting shells, so I made sure to send her with a bucket.

            The rest of the day went by as normal. I said goodbye to my daughter at daycare, went to work, met my wife for my lunch break, and then went back to work. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until I went to pick up Ana that afternoon.

            There were police cars lined up and down the block, and officers were searching everywhere. Ana's sitter was shaking hysterically on her porch. I ran up to her, frantic about the safety of my daughter. When she told me what had happened, I don’t remember how I responded. Things went black. By the time I came too, I was restrained on the ground by two officers. I didn’t mean to lash out. I just didn’t understand how someone could lose a three year old at the beach.

            A full scale investigation was launched. Witnesses and known child offenders were drawn from hundreds of miles away for questioning, but as the days ticked by nothing was giving us any leads.

            Mallory lost her mind when we lost Ana. I should have known that moving wasn’t going to save our marriage. That little girl was the only thing that kept that woman in my life, and without her I was as worthless in her eyes. When Mallory moved out, the scotch and Jack moved in. 

            Drinking helped me forget my pain; drinking helped me sleep. Sometimes when I slept I dreamed about Ana. Her wonderful curiosity and glowing personality. I remember the first week that we’d lived there, Ana made me take her to the beach every morning to pluck shells out of the sand.

            I don’t remember what compelled me to do it, but one morning I left our back patio and wandered down to the beach in nothing but my bathrobe and a bottle of liquor in my hand. I didn't care that it was storming. Maybe I felt that being there would help me relive that dream and feel close to my daughter, but I ended up just screaming at the violently crashing waves until my throat burned instead.

I started to cry sometime during my stumbled walk, I’d like to say the tears were provoked by loss, but it could have just as easily been the salty winds off the ocean assaulting my eyes; maybe a mix of the two. I’m not sure. I had too much fire in my stomach to distinguish between physical pain and emotion.

            As I went to take another drink, my foot caught on a piece of drift wood buried in the sand. I tripped and cursed sharply, as I watched my liquor spill in front of me. As I turned to flip off the log in a drunken rage, my eyes spotted something else in the sand a few meters away.

            My eyes narrowed in on the object – half buried, it was hard to distinguish at first- then the color settled with me… Bright purple. I crawled shakily to the object, and god the smell was rancid, but I needed to see it; I needed to see her. I rolled my daughter’s small, bloated body over to look at her face. It was pale from the cold, and her lips were a deep blue. As I sobbed, I pulled her close to me and watched as a single shell fell from her small, lifeless grip. 

I Am Poem

I am...

A Navy brat, middle child of six, with no mother to name.

A vagabond of the eastern United States’ coast.

A child of abusers; not to me, but to substance and themselves.

A second generation American, with a grandfather from Dublin and a grandmother from Sicily, on my father’s side of the family.

A member of the Shawnee Nation, where the only gift my mother gave me in life was her culture on the Oklahoma reservation.

Seen as a mutt to both sides of my family - half white, half native.

My father’s pointed nose and my mother’s high cheeks; my father’s warm smile and my mother’s dark eyes; my father’s curls and my mother’s complexion.

I am…

The persistent glare on my childhood friend’s TV, while we watched cartoons on a futon in her basement.

A pastel orange Tommy Hilfiger parka, just slightly too big to keep my small nose from turning red from the cold, while I played in the snow packed into our backyard patio in the winter of 2004.

A giant stuffed snake my dad won at the fair I would often fall asleep on while watching my brother play his GameCube.

The skateboard my brother gave me when mom took him with her; unfortunately, he wasn’t my dad’s, so he couldn’t stay when she left.

I am…

David Bowie’s permanently dilated pupil and fashion sense from the 80s.

A vegetarian, former vegan, of three years.

Graphite on paper - portraits of the people I draw.

An activist, a feminist, a liberal, a queer.

The stabbing throb of a migraine behind my eyes.