On the day of your favorite color:
Here is the day of pumpkins,
their hollow heads lit and leering. Here
is the stripped sweetness of candy corn
cupped in my hands. Here is fall
swirling the leaves into a storm of red-
gold fire. Here is the sunset,
shorter now. And here is memory,
spilling from its orange coat:
your mandarin sheets, your russet
couch, kisses the color of burning.
Here is the day of heartbreak
ripened to glow. Here is the day of ghosts.
* * *
Lauren Kizi-Ann Alleyne is the author of Dawn In The Kaatskills (Longshore Press). No Tell Motel first published this poem in September 2009. Lauren wrote, [This poem is] "part of an ongoing obsession of mine with relationships of all kinds—between lovers and friends, between the past and the present, between the various aspects of our own selves. Because so much of who we are is tied up in the relationships we're in, we're always balancing how much we are willing to give or give up to establish, and maintain these bonds, and as they change, we have to reevaluate who we are. This is the experience that the poems and I keep coming back to..."
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