Everything Blue, Even You
By Elya Braden
Later, the pink peace of blanket enfolding you, tamed chaos
of your mahogany curls, soothed by a nurse’s soft brush.
But now, everything blue, even you, in that slow-motion eternity
after redlight shriek of your heart monitor flooded my body
with tremors and my room with bodies, hands unhooking drips,
hands tucking stiff sheet around my shivering body, arms
hoisting me onto metal gurney, squeak and rumble of wheels
racing on linoleum, white tent pitched below my breasts, hiding
the bloody business of your rescue, as the anesthesiologist plunged
a long, silver needle into my spine. Oh epidural, grace of liquid
calm and ahhhh, release from last night’s Pitocin-drip monster
fisting me into purple moans and ragged gasps. In that hush,
everything blue: my husband’s slate eyes, hovering beyond
the white tent, so distant above his light sky paper gown and mask,
as distant as my first car, a powder blue Mustang, down the indigo road
of time, like my single life, and now, the life we knew as just us two
already a blue smudge vanishing over the horizon as the blue-
masked surgeon sets down her bloody scalpel and airlifts you
from the eggplant sac of my womb, glistening on my belly.
You emerge blue into this world, umbilical cord wrapped
thrice around your body, once around your neck, your wet
face shadowed in midnight, teetering on the banks of the Styx,
hesitant to enter this life. “Stay here,” I whisper to my memory
of little blue you. “Stay here.” Then the petals of your blue lips
open, guzzle red YES from the air. Red pinks your puffed out
cheeks. Red plumps your lips. Red surges your heart. Red howls
from your gaping mouth: YES, YES, YES.
Elya Braden is a writer and mixed-media artist living in Ventura County, CA, and is an editor for Gyroscope Review. She is the author of the chapbooks, Open The Fist and The Sight of Invisible Longing. Her work has been widely published and her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. www.elyabraden.com.