CERULEAN
Obvious Robin’s egg. O’Keefe’s New Mexican morning.
The distance between Austria and Ireland. Ancestral eye.
The granddaughter you’ll never meet. The color we thought bloomed
the iris while she floated in darkness. Great-great-great-great
someone. In Scotland. Before Lebanon. In Ireland. Before France.
Mornings in Colorado. When I traded wind for cloud. Earned oxygen.
Thick tributaries. Your lungs before the smoke. Your lungs after.
The dream of your lungs.
Before we knew. Cancer being colorblind.
You’d want Mary Cassatt in this poem.
Rosy children swathed in sky. Tended to. Water at their feet.
Floating. Eyes feasting sea. More. And more.
In your arms. Somehow we knew your granddaughter
would need calm. We named her for what carries on.
Her bedroom walls periwinkle. Vinca.
Morning glory. Cloud. Bluebonnet. Borage. Cloud.
Bee lust. Cucumber suck. Volunteer flax. Cloud.
I can’t bear another spring.
Smear my lids with your crushed
petal mouth.
_______________________________________________________________________
CLAUDIA F. SAVAGE is part of the experimental performance duo Thick in the Throat, Honey. The author of Bruising Continents (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017) and The Last One Eaten: A Maligned Vegetable’s History, Savage has published poems, essays, and interviews most recently in Water-Stone Review, Denver Quarterly, BOMB, Drunken Boat, Columbia Journal, Nimrod, Clade Song, and Literary Mama. She’s garnered awards from Ucross, Jentel, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, and RACC. Her collaboration with Detroit visual artist Jacklyn Brickman, reductions, about motherhood and ephemerality, will be in Chicago in 2018. She lives and teaches in Portland, OR.
_________________________________________________________________
Read more by Claudia F. Savage:
Author’s website
Five poems in Columbia Journal
A poem in Clade Song
Four poems in FRiGG