i take you to the zoo to make you beautiful 

i want to dip your hands in mauve
to show you how kind certain shades 
can hum-- can live under the fingernails. 
i want you to like purple as much
as i do. not because it's queer but because
we're not sure where it came from.
i'm taking you to the zoo
of colors. it's far away like everything 
worth visiting-- tucked in between corn fields
& hills that roll like a taffy.
we are chewing road. we are reaching our hands
out the window of a car that drives itself.
i look at you & want to pluck 
different colors from your body. i want
the brown of your hair to keep
in a fish tank on my dresser. i want
to make seeds of your irises & plant
bushes to sprout eyeballs like berries.
i'm sorry so sorry that i am such a strange person.
at the gate a machine strips us down
to grey scale. holds our pigments
in a box till we return.
we buy baggies of feed to nourish 
the colors--small paint pellets
that we cup in our hands-- careful
not to smudge any on ourselves.
you say you want to show me 
the yellow that used to come
in through your window in your
childhood bedroom. it sits 
in a terrarium. it doesn't move much
until it notices you which causes
the color to whine & scratch at the side
of the enclosure. you want to take it home
with us but i tell you that they're
dangerous. a color can 
destroy you with nostalgia-- can demand 
you step back through a memory.
you press your face to the glass before
we move on. the colors all remember us 
& i find the purple i was looking for--
the one i thought might make you 
never want to leave me. it emerged first
from an advent candle but then the color
returned in a summer eggplant & then 
again day after day for week in the sunset 
one august. how the color sung to me 
& told me to use it as a tightrope.
you don't see it though-- you don't 
feel the throbbing this purple means
& i tell you to touch it even though
we're not supposed to. your fingers
across its skull. a shuttering.
your bones giving in to the tone.
you, becoming all mauve-- down to your thoughts.
i watched the color eat you & you become 
a candle & an eggplant & a sky.
i take you home in a basket. i plead 
for you to tell me that story again
of the day we went to the zoo.