a bruise is sweet 

we go to look at eye shadow palettes 
at CVS even though they're cheap & made from 
smashed bugs & weeping plants.
one girl mentions that colors come 
out of her eye lids naturally--
that she doesn't need to rely 
on eye shadow like the rest of us.
i want blue & silver-- i want my face
to suggest it was once a window 
of sky. we all gather around the pools of color.
we all hold up our wrists 
to check what the colors would look like 
on our faces. there's no color 
anywhere else only in makeup. the sidewalk 
is a light grey & all our bodies are 
different shades of grey &
all our finger nails are a very faint grey
& at night even the stars are grey.
sometimes i take eye liner pencils 
& scribble the grass indigo or violet &
my lips green. no one remembers
what colors go where. the voices 
on TVs urge us to 
stick to our own faces & to
not get too wild with the last bits
of color or they might leave too.
the eye shadow palettes 
glisten. the eye shadow palettes promise
to make our faces in the landscapes.
i draw a desert on my friend's lips 
complete with a cactus flower.
i draw a coral reef on another's 
cheek & it brought out her bones.
i said before i want to be
the sky but i also want 
purple dripping from
my throat-- as if a bruise is a sweet
kind of tropical fruit. i open
a palette & dip my fingers in color,
licking each instead 
of painting with them. each color tastes
like sleeping-- like inverted greys--
as if a taste could save us.
i shrink down to the size of
an ant & frolic in the cakes 
of the palette-- feet covered in color.
i send my friends at text message explaining
i will never return & three people like it
& the other ones are already 
buried in their own palettes. oh color!
oh eco-system!
blue finger tips & a mirror to check 
myself in.