"theory of yellow" by Julia Haney
Image Credit: Rodion Kutsaev, obtained and licensed through Unsplash
theory of yellow
yellow is how we lock in warmth and still pierce through—
candyland splinters and we find each other again
under fluorescent hours, loosening
the way the edges of a soup bowl cool.
we are fantasy; we prove that nobody can stop
the lichen or starfish from spreading across the rocks.
in a splattered eruption
of leaking, lingering daybreak
we break
chalky, like the place between fruit and skin.
and it is always yellow
tendertelling us what we aren’t ready to hear,
always yellow, brittle and exacting,
that points to the undoing.
Julia Haney is the Digital Content Editor at a Boston startup and the Editor of Fiction & Poetry at Thalia Magazine. She loves breakfast and word games and trashy TV. Her poetry was selected by Mass Poetry to be featured on the Boston T and has appeared in Bamboo Ridge, in video poems by the painter, Morgane Richer La Flèche, and in a recent collection entitled, A Lemon Invitation.