Blue in Detroit

Blue is patches of sky, hovering over

Detroit at the cusp of fall, hung by God

for a people hungry for wider living

and open spaces, not this crumbling

concrete and burnt out houses across the street

from the elementary school playground.

That blue will become a polluted orange-pink,

a strange beauty that’ll make your eyes water

and fill you with longing for familiarity,

not this city of strangers who never loved me.

I’m not seeking pity.

I’m telling you how blue sinks into my belly—

Coltrane’s blue, starting slow as train wheels,

chugging along until it drives full steam, taking me

back in my mind home to Alabama, to a girlhood

that no longer exists except in melodies and riffs.

Blue is a pretty word people use when they don’t know

how it feels to spend another insomniac night

staring at a knife, just in case you can’t

wake to another grey day of dying.

When I tell them I can’t take another twenty-four hours,

they prescribe more pills and raise the dose.

It’s no coincidence that the pills are blue

and pink and yellow and white, the colors of sweet candy,

but tasting metallic like a razor blade or blood.

Every morning, I hold those pills in the palm of my hand

and consider the irony: how insane my sanity is

tiny and crushable and housed in small

plastic bottles I throw away every month.

Cheer up, they tell me, which is just another way

to say: You’re not trying hard enough.

But they’ve never carefully split

the skin alongside a blue vein,

barely missing the pulse.

That scar marks my wrist, reminds me

I’m still alive and I have a choice

that can’t be distilled to cliché.

One day at a time? I’m taking it word by word,

writing this poem while looking out

my window at a patch of blue sky in Detroit.

I’ve been trying for two decades to determine

the difference between living and dying,

and most days there is none.

When they ask—

Are you going to hurt yourself?—

I can honestly say I never know if I’m lying

or not when I tell them—

no.

But blue is just another word I’m writing

to survive another few seconds, while waiting

for that polluted sunset and then that grey dawn,

reminding me how the difference between

living and dying comes in shades of blue

and the exact measure of how much

sky I can see from my window today.

© Ami Mattison

For D'Verse Poets