Your mother believes in Egyptian cotton, eating meat, and a
person can never be too thin or rich.
Your dad lives in the land of sentiment and poetry and sends chocolates and
scented soap.
Their bed is white on white with matching comforter and shams.
You chose your backpack for contour and
cobalt blue pulls and
it never touches the floor.
When we set up house
your closet is a reverent shrine to
brass hangers facing north
dutiful soldiers displaying your clothes
filed by color:
carnation, coral, crimson, violet, periwinkle.
My closet was full of higgledy-piggledy
shoes on shoes
pants that look like someone just walked out of them
shirts stacked on hooks and socks hanging
on the edge of my laundry basket.
Your dresser
has the discipline of t-shirt rectangles in the center drawer
and identical underwear arranged by age in descending order.
I could not get enough of you
like the time I couldn’t satiate my desire for
the permanence of phthalocyanine blue on my canvases
or the honey-colored underglaze double layered on my
bisque-fired terracotta.
You held me and filled my obsession
until your compulsion
possessed you and took you
tunnel visioned towards
beige Chris
a single note
with colorless charm.
It ended in Hadley.
About Sharon Harper
Sharon Harper lives in Springfield, Missouri with poodles and cicadas and long hot summer days. She writes for a sense of clarity and fascination and wonder. Besides words, Sharon also likes to sculpt clay and figure out ideas in mixed media drawing.