Laura Zacharin is a poet, a physician, and the author of Common Brown House Moths (Frontenac House 2019), longlisted for the 2020 Gerald Lampert Award. She has been the recipient of University of Toronto’s Marina Nemat Award for Poetry and Freefall’s Micheline Maylor Prize. Her poetry has appeared in The Fiddlehead, CV2, The Malahat Review, Prism, Juniper, filling Station, and Arc Poetry.
“These poems are my response to Maggie Nelson’s lyric essay collection Bluets (2009).”
Have you heard of the new blue Yln Mn the first blue
pigment of its kind to be discovered since Thomas Jefferson
was president? Yttrium, indium, manganese. Maybe it’s the sound
blue makes. Midnight blue, cornflower, chambray
blue. Or a blue taste. Dennise says if business is slow
sell something blue. I buy her blue bowls and in a dream state,
make some of my own; I brush the insides blue. Prussian
blue, Egyptian blue, cetacean blue. So I can eat my blue meal
from a blue bowl. Blueberries, blackberries, plums of course. Some say
the color blue doesn’t exist. In nature or in the human body or
in impenetrable scientific explanations about reflection,
absorption and absence of the colour blue. But when I think
of Bluets or squeeze the small blue book into a pocket or inside
a textbook I pretend I’m reading on the streetcar, it’s obvious
the colour blue exists. In fact it’s obvious
that nothing else exists apart from blue. Of course
strawberries exist. Apples exist. Of course raspberries. Of course
we need to keep warm in winter, cool in summer. And keep
our respirations and heart rate even, within strict parameters. Our
temperature. Blue can’t do that or blue won’t try. Even water,
of which we are 60% (more in some organs for example
the lungs are 83%), isn’t really blue, I know that but I don’t care. Look here
come close. Bring your nose up to it. It’s redolent of. Rub your hand
along the grain of it. The length of it. All of it was only ever blue.
Before the word itself or its location, 440-490, between
violet and green, I merged into the cold and sweet of it, saying you
can’t see me blue, repeating names of blues, lips barely moving, lapis
lazuli twenty five percent blue lazurite, cyan, cerulean; what blue
tastes like smells like. It’s hard to explain. Especially the smell, ancient
and rudimentary, the smell of seafoam on Sea blue
hex colour # 006994 or Ocean boat blue # 0077be, sea salt
on the undertow. Just a dream I had most nights, blue crystal sharp
on my tongue, remembering everything about its history. Blue tarp
over what? Racked firewood, or breezeblocks and weather-
board, a wreck of a new red car, a campsite uninhabited
or someone sleeping, keeping out the rain but the blue tarp
can’t keep their feet dry. I steal the colour blue from her. She lets me
She has so much more, a life devoted to blue. She loved blue first
but she doesn’t care if I take some. From her basement from the attic
I pack feathery blue in garbage bags: fill my blue car
with the see-through blue plastic. I keep the windows closed
Blue keeps trying to escape especially when the car moves,
which it does eventually of course. I can’t stay here all day stealing
from her blue. I have to go home sometime make my own
full blue life. Just a bit more of that azure, that cornflower.
The doctor searches through her bag
for something blue. Pen, paper
a prescription pad, reflex hammer,
a halogen bulb. The bag itself is green-
ish blue in this light. Some eyes
are blue or appear blue. Under a slit lamp
they remain blue. I noticed a weakness
for blue eyed men. More so when I was younger.
There are no blue organs, no other blue
body parts. I don’t know why veins look blue
through the skin. Blood isn’t blue either. Still
we get by. We manage with red blood.
We have a pink tongue, hard and soft palate,
white bones, white matter, grey matter. We breathe
16 breaths per minute. Normal temp is 37
but can vary. P02 should be above 98. That’s how
we get by. The liver is brown, the gallbladder
is green. Even the heart is just a lumpy reddish
plain looking thing. Somehow, we manage
without. There’s something blue here,
somewhere, she says spilling everything out
onto her desk, her swivel chair, the loud beige flooring
