Along Namık Kemal Avenue
men sell nectarines
from pickup trucks—
mounds of them someone’s fashioned
into pyramids. I go past
down toward the park
thinking, poetically,
of nectarines and you
because I can’t decide
on the color of your skin. As children,
with our boxes of Crayolas,
all skin was peach unless it was
Jerome’s or Mikayla’s,
and then it was brown.
Life was simple then.
There were nectarines
maybe in the fridge, maybe
for a week, and you weren’t born,
so there was no skin
to imagine. In the park
I see boys pushing girls up the slide,
and down they go in heaps.
None have skin the color
of nectarines, and their hair,
unruly unlike yours, catches weather
from the Aegean Sea.
In some bedroom beyond,
you are still, a pencil in one hand
and a knife in the other.
This was originally published in Spring 2018 edition of The Helix.
