Hues

I am pregnant, and I am terrified of this 

new unknown. I am in the rain,  

entering my doctor’s building, 

shaking off the droplets, feeling cold

in their clinginess. On the elevator,

a child with pink cheeks holds her 

mother’s keys, and she is helpless 

as they slip from her hands and fall down 

the shaft. The child’s color grows to an 

ember red when her mother slaps 

her cheek and the startled girl puts her 

hand to her face, as if to see if it’s still there, 

and lets go of a high cry, moving her eyes up 

to stare at her mother, who squats and 

whispers something into her ear, 

something I can’t hear. The little cheek’s 

crimson color fades within minutes 

but in the days that follow it becomes 

the apricot of my evening sun, 

the burgundy in my paper-cut blood, 

the fuchsia gloss on my gray lips, 

the rhubarb syrup on my lavender fingertips

and the angry violet on my chapped feet, 

which I can barely see when I look for them

over my nine-month-old belly. 

Maybe the mother’s always this way. 

Maybe she was just having a bad day. 

I couldn’t do anything about it, anyway. 

But the red in my memory is livid now, 

a vivid instructor on a mother’s anger as she 

lashes out in her loneliness, a loneliness 

she’s never felt before, and her little 

one is the one who introduced her to it, 

so why not smack it away? And why not, 

sooner than soon, retreat into 

a soothing, milk-pale cocoon?