Crayons

Let us choose our words like a child chooses crayons,

calling them by their names of apricot,

instead of what we see, orange.

Let us peel off their paper coats

and draw sailboats in the inner wool,

so now we can roll them against the pages

we tore from the backs of books,

making wide inundations of color

that mushroom across the page,

so that we forget that the rivers we created

were once only a stiff rivulet between a child’s fingers.

Let us choose our words like a child chooses crayons,

as fastidiously as Renoir dismissed his brushstrokes from his hand

to the swathe of canvas as vast and ballooning,

liberated and pregnable as the tract of a whale’s belly.

Let us choose our words like a non-native speaker,

who dares not call a fountain a toilet,

and takes care in plucking words

like searching for and paying full price for unbruised pears.

Let us choose our words like a crayon, a Renoir brushstroke, an unbruised pear,

and pay full price for what they bring,

for tomorrow we may have to choose our words like the way clock hands

choose to strike a certain number

and the world wills its self to follow what wood says,

let us choose our words like we must beg forgiveness from clocks

for telling the world wrong.

-anna sluder