Your jacket is box elder basal sprout green,
your shoes green like a three ring binder. If I peeled
back your skin long enough, after all the flesh
the base would be garlic green.
I know your eyes are federal standard 15450,
air superiority blue, but they feel like longleaf pine green,
down home and hearty, bright like peas
in shepherd’s pie green. When I feel you, I see
Appalachian understory beneath a gibbous moon
bending around my fingertips. Crayola brand green is
the color when I smell you. When I taste you—mint
and caraway, the flavor of towering lemon
grass stalks. I am green in my wanting you, green that is
nervous and terror—the shaking of dormant tree
limbs, or the snap of a consenting book.
Goddamn, have you ever seen the green in thunder?
Green that comes from a man in the process
of trading fractions of himself for the whole he’s
always wanted. I have seen what comes
of comfort—the green in whisky and wanting for anything else.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 18, Issue 2.
See all items about Christopher Petruccelli