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.
Christopher Petruccelli is the author of Action at a Distance, available at etchingspress.org. His poetry has appeared in Blast Furnace, Connotation Press, Gingerbread House, Rappahannock Review, and elsewhere. In his free time, Chris likes to drink whisky and smoke cigarettes with older women.
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