Not Your Color

I am not a girl who is pretty in all seasons.
With the russet of fall painted on my mouth
the scar across my face (climbing from the lip)
Splits the silence with a noise less like Mozart,
Closer to clanging;
Rock metal, metal and rocks.

Winter blues recall the time,
Drowning in surgery, waves of wire
The blood didn’t beat strong enough to bat back the tide
of the specter of grief cast on a child struggling to grow a face
acceptable to Polite Society
Nursing a lifelong fear of the sea.

In the peach blush of spring, here I am Alive.
Flowers bloom open-lipped
And no picnicker cares if a cleave in the petals
Reveals bees too far apart, whisper-whistling.
Too focused on flitting licks of honey,
Brief inevitabilities; flirted dreams.

In summer, it is Ivy.
Roasted skin pock-marked in daylight damages
Remade, remarked as Cute, Youthful,
Have hidden away the red thread, a stuck floss.
And those sweetly glinting late-night sunsets
Draw all eyes, momentarily, to greater climbs of color. Mottled, Perfect.

Then the dark. The sky glittering freckles.

 

Madison J. Salters has been published internationally in outlets including Armstrong Literary Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, HuffPost, United Nations Press, TripAdvisor World Guides, The Untitled Magazine, Wanderlust, and more. She is editor-in-chief at The Toolbox, nonfiction editor at Ruminate, and fiction editor at Ragazine.CC. Named the 2019 Uncomfortable Revolution Writing Fellow, a UNESCO Ambassador of Cross-Cultural Dialogue, and a “Wunderkind” by Westchester Magazine, she also serves as a JOLT and Speakizi lecturer on storytelling. She helped translate the documentary “Queer Japan,” and her first play, An Infinite Resignedness, was produced in Paris in 2018.