This week’s episodes are guest hosted by Diannely Antigua.

TRANSCRIPT

I’m Diannely Antigua, and this is The Slowdown.

I remember when my favorite color was whatever my brother’s favorite color was. If his favorite color was Ninja Turtle green, then so was mine.

These days, my favorite color is burnt orange. I have a burnt orange leather couch, with matching pillows. Burnt orange is the color of bubbly cheese on a pizza, the hem of a summer sunset, the swirl of butternut squash soup. It reminds me of warmth, of fall, to be at the brink of transformation. I’d like to think that I, too, exist at the brink of transformation. Life continues to ask me to change course, and I accept the invitation, trusting there will be more incarnations of burnt orange in my future.

I believe color carries energy. It carries memory. I remember when I was young, coming home from the hospital after being sick. The teal paint on my bedroom walls suddenly felt overwhelming. It reminded me of sickness, of that version of myself I didn’t want to return to. A few days later, my dad and my uncle painted my walls a light beige. The color of cream. Or the pages of an old book. Or the color of my dog’s soft belly when she’d roll over, asking for a rub. I remember how calming it felt. How it erased what the room had previously carried and gave me the canvas to begin again.

I think about that now, how color can hold a feeling or release it. It can shape the way we move through a space, the way we remember a time in our lives. And maybe that’s part of growing into ourselves. Learning what we’re drawn to, and why. Learning what we want to keep, and what we need to let go of.

Today’s poem lives inside that kind of remembering. It moves through color and memory, through the ways we try to name what we’re drawn to, and what we might have missed along the way.

Blue
by Laura Villareal

when I was young, I wanted to name paint samples.
                  varieties of blue like whispering night air, tragic
lake. whites like echoing eggshell,

                  memory of light. yellow like nervous blossom,
hay in afternoon sun. purple like shivering mountain
                  laurel or green like air after rain.

it’s said light blue
                  will keep birds from building—
they believe it’s the sky.

                  but how could anyone not want to live in the sky?
even mud daubers
                  won’t create their clay pots

on anywhere colored like flight.
                  disney paints buildings they want to hide
in bye-bye blue—

                  the same color as the eyes
of boys who knew how to love me
if only I blended in

                  with their hands. when I was young,
I painted my room blue hydrangea—
                  “dare” by the gorillaz played on my indigo radio

& now when the song comes on
                  as I’m driving my white car on the dusty backroads,
I remember the smell of paint

                  & summer light. my old flame-
point cat lying on the clear paint tarp.

all those places I missed—
                  I wouldn’t notice until years later.

"Blue" by Laura Villareal. Previously published in Poetry. Used by permission of the poet.