Juliana Gray
Neon blue, raver blue, you flash
on iron in hemoglobin, luminesce
a dark room into a disco scene
of violence. Opal blue, you flare
on walls, under carpet, between floorboards –
trouble blue, bright as Otter Pops
that colored my tongue when I used to play at solving
summer mysteries of my own invention
with magnifying glass and ransom notes
painted in lemon juice invisible ink.
Curacao blue in college, you lit
every episode of Forensic Files
I watched alone in my dorm. Cobalt blue
that signals red, you light the way to a life
extinguished, a story someone tried to erase.
***
Juliana Gray’s third poetry collection, Honeymoon Palsy, was published by Measure Press in 2017. Recent poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Pine Hill Review, Poetry Northwest, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University.