POETRY

The Color I Become

By Elizabeth Langemak     VOLUME 51.1

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READ BY AMANDA GUNN

Again I let the moon drink me
away from myself, but still I try
to color myself back in; sometimes
lifting the brush is enough; the first

coat of paint always cerulean,
color of the glass eye of a drunk man;
then red, the rust trellising up a shack
that belongs to me because I see it;

now yellow, the sun that cannot
bear my gaze, can only be itself;
to descend as it pours into me;
I drink and I drink and I drink; oh,

my love is a wind-wet quarry; is the color
I become when I am no longer thirsty;






TARFIA FAIZULLAH’s first book, Seam, won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her honors and awards include an Associated Writers Program Intro Journals Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, a Copper Nickel Poetry Prize, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, and a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Margaret Bridgman Scholarship in Poetry. A Kundiman fellow, she lives in Detroit and is an editor for the Asian American Literary Review and Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Series. Her second collection, Register of Eliminated Villages, is forthcoming.

VOLUME 51.1