“antique fuchsia”

by Rich Boucher

The sky was the color of antique fuchsia,

and now I have to apologize for trying to be poetic

about how everything looked when I craned my head

to look above; there’s no other way to say

what I was thinking when my sisters

told me you’d breathed your last.

The sky being any color at all

should never matter to us,

but tell me who doesn’t look up

when the cost of looking the nearest person

in the eyes is too much to pay?

Let there be no more stories, songs

or poems about how the sky did what,

or how the sky felt like this or that,

or how the sky looked like the color

of anything else that is not the sky.

I wish a thousand people would

ask me what kind of father you were,

so that I could tell them that no sky

could ever display all your colors right.

I was happy even for the clouds, sometimes.

Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in The Nervous Breakdown, Eighteen Seventy, Menacing Hedge, Drunk Monkeys and Cultural Weekly, among others. Rich serves as Associate Editor for the online literary magazine BOMBFIRE. He is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me, a collection of poems published by Jules’ Poetry Playhouse Publications. Peep richboucher.bandcamp.com for more. He loves his life with his love Leann and their sweet cat Callie.