*They say that
Van Gogh ate yellow paint
To put the happiness inside him.
But she, instead, would
Cut out the sadness from her skin
And let the hatred pour out
In gushing streams of red,
Her screams echoing
The injustice of colour.
Her wheat skin looked prettier, she thought,
With the raked furrows of half healed scars
And painful slurs
Etched into the deep ochre of her soul.
She quietly detested her terracotta skin,
Smooth like a polished stone
Picked up from the Ganges.
But here in the pale waters of the Thames
She was a blot of burnt sienna on an otherwise ivory white riverbank.
And every new cut
Would heal bloodless and waxen,
Which made her vow to herself to cut off her skin completely,
Leaving nothing but
The darkened red of her fury
And a frightened echo of a scream
In a room filled with bitter laughs and slurs,
In a room filled with the muffled cries of the oppressed and unheard.*