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.