~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Kelli Rush

Death Came Dry and Yellow

Marigolds talk, even in drought,

and tell me yellow is good—

just pinch off the old blooms

and I’ll have happy yellow through September,

but it’s the yellow that I hate,

the way it smacks me in the face

at sunup when I crest a hill and how

today you died and how

tomorrow I will curl my eyelashes,

brush on just the faintest touch of blush

to mask that sunken yellow look,

the yellow of the day you died,

the dry and hissing yellow

of the hay and rust-pocked poplars,

the gauzy, phantom yellow of cicadas

humming high and nowhere in a field

and gnawing, knotted, in the brain,

especially at sunset, only in summer.

The only yellow that I want

takes three days to get here,

like a pear, ripening. It comes quietly. God,

I want the folded, floral, yellow hush of homes,

a quilt, a patch of sunlight on a wall,

a simple square.

It isn’t yellow that I hate

but the instant of your fear,

the instant that you knew—

it isn’t death I hate, but yours,

and how the sun comes up

Kelli Rush lives in her home state of North Carolina and recently left the corporate world in Winston-Salem, where she wrote and edited for the tobacco industry. Her interests include history, local music, atomic-era style, and Appalachian travel. Her poems have appeared in the Southern Poetry Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Plainsongs, The Hawaii Review, The Nantahala Review, Wicked Alice, and Blaze Vox.