To the girl who remembered her color was green

after Ross Gay, after Gwendolyn Brooks

Poetry, Lavanya Arora

Congratulations on having a baby / at the brink of another war 

Remember your teenage self / cutting anemic thighs

Your father detested / your mother, the only desert gardener

Locked in a reflective glass tower / your brother played Pokémon 

Go, while a drunken sandstorm raged / in the master bedroom

You hid under the dining table with a positive pregnancy 

Strip, announcing your sister’s arrival on forbidden sites

Now archived / misery is a frittered teenager’s best friend

Your husband must be different / lineage of healers / tender brick 

Red blossoms I saw in a five-star beach shack / eating dates

Half-chewed from your mouth a few years later / you told me

This is how you feed a beloved / palm trees hunched on the horizon

Already hopeful / definitions jumped out of a fleeting dictionary

You remembered your colour is green / you’re finally spring

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Lavanya Arora (they/he) is an independent researcher and writer currently based in Bengaluru, India. Their literary work has found a home in Josephine Quarterly, Frontier Poetry, Thimble Literary, and elsewhere. Will they ever finish editing their first book-length manuscript? Only time will tell.