Flight Delay: Your Surprising Convergence with the Idea of Beloved Lavender-Blue

Amy PoAGUE

I supposed my favorite color

to be pink advancing along a continuum of pinkening,

approaching a platonic ideal of pink

only possible in a flattened past,

but you arrive stealthily: my multi-dimensional future,

preferred electromagnetic radiation. When I was a child,

another child offered me a survey

crayoned with choices, boxes to check.

The option to prefer pink had me spinning. Today, in middle age, 

I have another answer, a treasure slow to move me:

Your textured person plumping out reality

perfectly periwinkle. 

Though not literally blue-purple,

your low voice is a certain shade of photons singing—

so calmly visible you include the invisible.

Such a blessing decelerates 

our sky-ride,

the purple-blue seat slowly scrolling above the fair.

We take an open-air nap

inside each other’s wavelengths.

The likeminded sky, audacious to dawdle,  

asks us what we prefer, and we can answer today!

We prefer

not to be jarred 

from our slowest flying.

Amy Poague (she/her/hers) is an Iowa City-based poet working at a junior high. She holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Cabinet of Heed, Juke Joint, The Mantle, SWWIM Every Day, Really System, Transom, where is the river :: a poetry experiment, Rockvale Review, and Ghost City Review. She can be found online at amypoague.wordpress.com and on Twitter @PoagueAmy.