Lynn Powers © 2006 All Rights Reserved
Lynn Powers © 2006 All Rights Reserved
Violet
Best when grouped with words like a bouquet,
your head on my shoulder’s horizon,
the eyeglass of the heart. A rare bird
flying across the mind,
barest stretch of sea.
Your gaze threaded into mine.
Not the pansy’s dainty, pinto face,
instead the fan’s cool currents
against our sweat pale like orchids,
so birds brush against windows
to see. Violet is your hair’s blackness,
your brown skin, the gathering
of your slender body to mine,
how fragile, corruptible; violet
the grief of knowing you won’t always be mine,
when loss is every color in the right tone of
breeze, the sweet entrapment of arms,
as we save ourselves from
that which we don’t want to be saved.
Outside the bare tree is violet,
wet black bark and all its invisible blooms
woven into thick leaves of hair,
the wind casts by and curls, unfolds, extends.
STACIE LEATHERMAN is a student in the MFA program at Vermont College. Her work has appeared in the Big Toe Review, the Cream City Review (poetry contest winner, 2002), and the Beacon Street Review. She lives in Cleveland.