Maria Jacketti: Crayons of the Flesh
Crayons of the Flesh
©2001 Maria Jacketti
Children of the sixties, resurrect your deluxe Crayolas. The sacred box of sixty-four has expanded like the quantum universe, but one color is missing, extinct, in fact— remember the crayon named Flesh
a beige so Caucasian, it shamelessly cried, “Crown me Miss America.” No kin of tan, copper, mahogany, or a thousand other earth goddess browns— A color to die for, eugenically correct, pilgrim-engineered, a color to kill for, that Barbie-babe-beautiful flesh, impossible café au lait
of Ivory Soap suburbs where war could never happen, a color I could never have either, no matter how hard I wished for it. What then is a child who cannot find the color of her skin? Invisible. Uncolored. A prism without light. But at last the Olive crayon whispered to me the secrets of my flesh, my foreignness, oil of green mixed with gold, the deep Mediterranean, so much closer to Africa.
Illumination
©2001 Maria Jacketti
Friend, when I had nowhere that was when I knew that we had something less after all the test is trite try desperation I would have slept on your floor except you didn’t have one funny how the house stayed erect I guess we were always on quicksand
On My Father’s Birthday
©2001 Maria Jacketti
Which golden age is this, Dear Father? I cannot remember your exact age, nor mine for that matter. Epochs over the mountain, crucified on the rocks, rocking me, your only baby, telling me to endure like a diamond and become a good doctor. You are passing, passing, like ether through my bones and blood, each year, a sequoia-ring, an orbit out from the screams of a life sacrificed for God-knows-what. Some would say your baby has become old wine, but now with the ascension of your ghost, nearer than my own breath, I am born to discover the words we never had the language to speak.