Kind of Blue when I need the gleam of gold-streak morning
sky, daffodil petals hanging low, possum tongue-smear
landscapes inside broken duck eggs. Pollen season yellows
the town, grits our eyes, powder-paints cars before we leave
work—my lunchbox, too, hanging by its miniature leash
with the same radish salad I traveled yesterday and the day
before. Something in the definition repels. Pungent. Edible.
Radish. Made possible thanks to mad swish of honeybees
taking a shine to four-petaled blossoms. Fact: also edible.
Kind of Blue when I ignite bergamot and boxwood scented
candles; my English grandmother returning to my mind
the sculpted, knee-high shrubs outlining brick pathways
veining through her garden and orchard in Kingsteignton.
She spent war-wife years there, giving birth to two
children on grayish-yellow wooden planks balanced atop
a hospital tub. When she’d tell me the story, she whispered
when she got to feelings of guilt over taking up space, using
the make-shift bed the wounded should have been granted.
I knew what she meant. I picture her face in the background,
in films about WWII or England. Kind of Blue on repeat
hours past the last sunbeam’s whistle and glow on old-plank
floors. The smell of boxwoods after rain reminds me to listen,
to trust the curve and color of her cheek, the wave of her hair
and all I’ve been given—the Miles I go to before I sleep.
Michele Parker Randall is the author of Museum of Everyday Life and A Future Unmappable. Her works can also be found in Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Poetica Review, SWWIM, and elsewhere. She feels strongly that embracing work by and about neurodivergence lessens the stigma surrounding mental illness.