portion of the artwork for Terri Brown-Davidson's poetry
Blue Notes
Terri Brown-Davidson

I’ve never savored the succulent blue hue
that, in saner minds, evokes vanishing-
horizon-point skies and robin’s eggs

I long to toss from their nests and crack.
There’s something unreal about azure,
an artificial color that smacks, oh-so-subtly,

of Eternal Sleep and the mind tacked down
like the slackening mouth stitched tight in its coffin.
Once I loved a student who was stabbed two hundred times.

Her parents fluffed her gorgeous gold hair,
displayed her wound-riddled body discreetly
in its coffin and posted photos of Kristi around it

at her prom, animated, laughing, concealing
her mouth with blunt-cut crimson nails,
hairspray lacquering her voluminous yellow mane

into high teased masses, a diaphanous black dress
opening over taut calves. I couldn’t emotionally fathom it,
I suppose, how unreal she looked, this young girl I’d adored

and traded quips with in class, pestered for tips
about my own untameable tresses (Kristi a cosmetologist
at the Hair Hut then). Her eyes seemed glued shut, flesh-tinted, heavy;

her hands rested neatly on a double thickness of slick sheets,
the exquisite blue satin used to cover the holes
extending everywhere, from her neck to her ankles,

none of that trauma evidenced
by the girl in her coffin. Shifting in line
with her sobbing sister, gazing stunned at her lipsticked face,

so serenely set I couldn’t guess
where the muscles were that had tightened Kristi’s full lips,
angular jaw, I knew she’d become an object to me,

a robin’s-egg prettiness I longed to seize in both hands
to feel the depths of her wounds
split open under my fingers.


Return to Archive




FRiGG: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry | Issue 33 | Summer 2011