Back to Issue 11
Johnnie Clemens MayBurnt SiennaMagenta, she whispered over and
over, even before she had learned the words majestic and magnificent. Mahogany sounded solid, unlike the life she lived with family, moving almost every year, but midnight blue seemed too dark, a color too close to black, too threatening-- the color of a sky without stars or as menacing as the weeds outside, tall and jagged while melon looked washed out-- her mother with shoulders bent, her grandmother, napping in the scarred green leather chair most of the day, pining for a lost life in Tennessee. Blue violet, the color of kings, reminded her of homemade jam, and she loved the way it blended so well with burnt orange, the paint her big sister had picked to cover the walls of the apartment where they all lived in four rooms behind the used furniture store her father owned. This Florida orange—the hot shade of shame from a leather belt snapping, slapping at backs and buttocks. But burnt sienna was this child’s favorite crayon name—only because of the way the word sienna slipped along her tongue as she chanted it night after night while lying on the ribbed sofabed. Harsh words from her parents’ bedroom silenced by sienna: a light rain falling or the promise of sunlight. |
Johnnie Clemens May has an MA with a concentration in poetry from Indiana University and an MFA from Pacific University. For over twenty years she taught poetry at the college level and has led workshops, has judged poetry contests, has participated in readings and has acted as a reader for a local literary journal. Her work has appeared in Quarry, Salt River Review, Mused, Free Verse News and Four Chambers. |
