CW: death, blood.
I’d originally planned on writing a nightmarish short story, but it turned out better as a poem. It also became a way for me to explore grief and the loss of a loved one while attempting to deliver a more surreal and cinematic reading experience overall. I’d previously written and published a poem “Annihilation of Blue” and consider this piece to be a continuation on the theme of colors being annihilated from existence.
The day they found your broken body soaked in rain
like black tea was the same day I lost my ability to see the color red.
I was like a bee perceiving only its shadowprint everywhere.
This was around the time I wanted to try writing poetry in red ink,
but I couldn’t find any red pens around my place;
not even a single red crayon or colored pencil.
They had all suddenly disappeared. I wondered if
I was the only one this was happening to, but I was too afraid
to ask anyone I knew. I was also too afraid to drive.
What if I could no longer see stop signs or red lights?
What if the other drivers couldn’t either?
For some reason, red only appeared to me in my dreams.
One night, I dreamed that I was trapped inside a red room.
Everything was red including the bedsheets, curtains, walls,
and even the lightbulbs. The autocratic redness made me
think of a cannibal’s heart turned inside out, and I had
the bizarre feeling that I had been scalped in my sleep.
On top of the bed someone had left a bizarre mask that looked
like an inflatable black seat cushion with a hose attached to it.
I glanced over at one of the walls and noticed painted
photorealistic fingers on its surface so it appeared as if
a giant hand had been encased inside it. When I opened
the only door inside the room, it led me to an identical red room,
only smaller. I continued entering smaller and smaller
rooms until I came to a door too small for my body to fit through.
In waking life, I started to wonder if my blood had turned transparent
inside my braided veins. And I was tempted to cut my thumb
with a knife to see if it would bleed out the whispering clarity of holy water.
The day they turned your body into white ashes,
my ability to see the color red returned,
along with the taste of claret and old pennies in my butcher paper mouth.
In the kitchen, I halved an apple and the world darkened
like a sun setting down the throat of an embalmed empire.
