I found Jesus at the end of the street, up on steps moss-spotted green,
hung on stylized barbed wire sculpted oh-so-sincere. Of all the things
to pass through my mind, the first is Martha Stewart’s favorite color
combination, its steel grey set against the mint green and beige of the
trailer across the street, alone between the trees.
I. Everything is green, even the skies, and it reminds me of you, and
the blue of the night that ringed itself around yellow-orange
streetlights. When you’d walk me home, barefoot, and you’d give me
what was too easy to be a hard time, with an air that I have failed to
find in anyone else, and I’d always wonder, I still wonder, if you
would let me know if I was hurting you.
II. And the road twists into chalky grey gravel in construction, and
the dry dust fog that forms keeps my mouth shut. It’s sand in my
lungs or your ridicule in my ears. And I knew a long time ago that I’d
met someone who played this hate-game better, the way you lifted
your eyebrows above your sunglasses. But we were accomplices
then, and now we’re just playing alone. Even as your skin changed
colors in the morning light, I could see the way you were changing the
rules.
III. And I’ve always loved the way rows in fields unfolded
themselves to their vanishing point when you looked at them rolling
by at automobile speeds, and right in front of you is the part in the
sea, a meticulous divide. And maybe you are two people: you are the
person I came to believe existed, and you are the sterotype I tried
not to see. And maybe I am two people as well: the one who laughs
when you make your mistakes, and the one who wishes I hadn’t let
you make them. We are the same as those green rows: one day we’ll
be dead, dry, and cut to pieces.
Lots of houses are orange-yellow peach. The real color of peach flesh,
bright and acidic, not the milky orange of your peach-flavored
whatever, or the pale pinkness of that crayon that Crayola was too
scared to name Caucasian, but an assaulting yellow, slightly less
aggressive than mango-orange. The others are soft pink and off-white,
sometimes lazy cement colors. But there are purple-and-white flowers
that cascade down the walls and over the fences in their May effort,
and it’s ironic to think how thankful I am for the masks of vines hiding
the ugly monotony.