Poem of the Month

Orange

At the beginning of my life, all dwelt in orange. I swear the womb, my first room, my mother, my eyes were orange. I used to call out to the places on that warm light surface, depth was in the surface, surface and depth, one.

Yet how is it that we think we can articulate childhood at all? It was a different country, a different eon. We lived in fascination always. Fascination of the breast, of orange walls, of mother, of the enormous house, the back porch that rocked like a high ship, the front door to the outside where jungles and strange playfellows grew.

Fascination of tadpoles and small frogs, minnows and silver light in the creek, rainbows in oily puddles. Fascination of the hill that fell for years of running down the long back of our house. Fascination of grasshoppers and never any real separation, never outside of me, never me other than it.

In this way children are like animals: in love with their prey.

They say it is practical and imperative to structure the singularity of childhood, when god was an enormous distant white man who loved me even more than my parents. It is practical to structure God, ask why he never showed up but never stopped floating around the rafters of our church.

I have a mind to go back to the haunts of my first six years and sit as silently as possible, make myself stiller and stiller until the chaos of my eons since distills and I can hear the echos of my original thoughts. That hunger that knows no separation from the plate.

-Nina Alvarez