Her days are gray watercolor, pale on thin paper.
It has soaked through into soft, lumpy creases
like the lines on her forehead or cream left in sun.
She is a toy train left running on its endless metal loop,
hollow breaths without inhale, moving without movement.
Fuel and track are here, but the conductor has fallen asleep.
Her thoughts blend like nectar on honey-comb walls,
the impatient drip still not enough to push her from the hive.
In this golden opposition, she watches earth dance without her.
What could pull her out like the pit out of a plum
was not hoping, nor was it medicine or error.
She was lost in an open sea, red bricks tied to her ankles.
But chains may loosen in the bright white of baby, challenged
by new life in peril. It is her time to fail wholly, to surrender,
forever choosing absence over presence, shallow over deep.
Or it is her time to look at what she has lost;
husband, independence, her life. Ten years of stale air
has finally split her open, fully agape at the seams.
In a burst of concentrated ignorance and esteem
she has acted, she has won. As if guided by Divine hands,
gray has peeled away. Dress her in pinks, yellows, greens.
Winner of WCSU Best Creative Writing Piece