Andrea Penner
May It Please Superior Court
Their favorite color is blue.
Eyes, soft as a lazuli bunting.
Blue, like the mountains of Santa Cruz
on late evening drives, blue
highway wending down through
redwood forests to the green-
blue sea. Watery sky, sublime
Paris blue. Fluid boundary
birthing ocean, cloud.
California blue, they tell you. Indigo,
sung by midnight saxes, transposed
sapphires. You know—piano vibes.
Not your seventies’ Joni album Blue.
A stripe of harmony in rainbow
flags—fly yours! Androgynous, like
spiky hair, bubblegum, and recycled 501s.
Non-binary blue, eighteen candles tall,
legal birthday, turquoise pride takes the cake.
Petition granted. Their name is Blue.
The Writer’s Asana
I write
short
loose lines
because my hand goes numb
if I grip
too tightly
or type for too long.
I write in snapshots
because my mind
photographs
its memories
for Anne Lamott’s
one-inch picture
frame that holds only
so much color, line
and shadow.
I write myself
into a corner
with nowhere
else to go but
there
where
I must stay
until I write
myself out
again
again because
out of things to say
or else to go nowhere
but there
here.
I write beneath the flannel night
and into the denim pocket of the afternoon.
I write
sideways in my journal
pen poised with an unquiet mind in child’s pose.
Andrea Penner lives in New Mexico where she serves up poetry and creative non-fiction on In Our Own Ink. Her poetry appears most recently in Neologism, Sky Island Journal, and Flora/Fauna (Open Shutter). Her second book, Rabbit Sun, Lotus Moon (Mercury HeartLink, 2017), was a poetry finalist for an Arizona/New Mexico book award. Once upon a time, she was a college professor. Before that, well, that’s another story, the stuff of her memoir-in-progress, which she aspires to write with clarity and grace.
