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Why is blue sorrow and yellow joy?
Last I checked, blue was the color of
the never ending sky in summer.
It was the crashing waves
and paint on your toenails.
Tears aren’t blue. But the tear
in your blue jeans – I remember it –
was over your knobby-left knee.
Blue M&Ms… your favorite.
And the note you wrote to
me when we first met was in
blue ink. You said, “Does a crush
sound cliché?” And I said,
“Sure it does.” But we
both knew I didn’t even care.
I wanted our love as blue as a cliché.
Last I checked, yellow was lightning,
the light that followed the boom like your father’s voice,
a sound that sent you running downstairs.
Yellow were the teeth of the old homeless woman on 32nd Street,
and the teeth of the spiky yellow
comb you used to brush the gum out of your hair.
It was the piss in your cup on testing day –
positive. Yellow is a lemon: Lemon scented Clorox wipes,
like the ones I used to wipe
your blood off of the mirror in the bathroom. Yellow – it’s always
such a happy color, yet I don’t feel happy
when I lay the daffodils on your grave
every
April
twenty-
first.
Why did our love turn yellow?
And red. Last I checked I didn’t give a damn about red because all I saw was the tear in your
jeans, the dark scab beneath it, and blood over my mosaic in the mirror where you once stood.

Markie Scheidegger is currently a senior at NAU. She will be receiving a bachelor’s degree in English, with an emphasis in Creative Writing, and minors in Philosophy and Studio Art. While writing is her first love, she also has a deep passion for art and painting. She enjoys much of what Flagstaff and Northern Arizona have to offer, including hiking, biking, and great vegetarian food. One day she hopes to travel to each end of the Earth and write about her experiences abroad.