Color can be a bridge

The poem I needed to write in 2025

Take a class with Kim Young in Glassell Park if you can.

This summer, the workshop she convened was a gift of a healing circle, after I experienced a pregnancy loss in June. I want to share the poem (spacing + enjambment) a little funky in Substack) I wrote in community there. Lumin Wakoa’s painting “Untitled (bones)” was the portal I used to write into my grief. Thank you to Alexi for bringing this painting to our altar to honor your friend.

										
Color can be a bridge
	after Lumin Wakoa (1981 - 2025)

	Chromosome, star, butterfly, bone, the grace of girlhood.
Lumin’s panel asks light to stay close, glint from inside the linseed.
     There is a new will required to heat a room with your presence—
	The transmission of color can feel bone to bone; blood to blood.
June eleven was the day the bleeding changed. 
Smallest One, 
I utter into the ether where your heartbeat has gone. 
A wavelength we have not an instrument to measure, 
only the gnostic yearnings. And Lumin, with us, paints her missive 
with a vast focal length, we need the breadth of this solar system 
to clock it. Inward.
		    I tried to eat enough hardboiled eggs, 
even when their texture made me squirm, because I wanted to 
believe in your miraculous neural tubes, Little One. 
Maybe your map was folded 
and then refolded and it was illegible, untenable. 
Who decides, cartographer of light?
      Color is how you speak to me now. 
	Her painting.
	And Crystal quilted me a heart square that is perfection. 
	And I bought a linen cardigan off a flea market rack 
none other than periwinkle. This morning, I roll its sleeves 
up to my elbows: I’m simultaneously at a Florida resort 
spreading out my seashells on a hot towel, in the horse magic reverie 
of my childhood, and protected 
inside a hundred year old hunting shack buffeted by an elder oak tree. 
	Color can be a bridge. The butterflies, chromosomes, 
the grace. Lumin’s painting’s burnished by a soaring.
It catches the sky in its face. Mirror for scrying: the aura of grief 
that connects me to the grief of motherhood across time immemorial. 
For as long as there has been potential, 
there has been the blood we hope for and the blood we brace against. 
And there has been a circle held, as steady as 
the hummingbird’s compass needle, metronome, 
sensory arrow on a twilight wire—“5, 6, 7, 8”— 
she counts off our dance, a pressing and precious gesture 
symmetry cannot break. The wet, dry, wet, dry of our eyes 
for all time. Color of my gratitude.

Untitled (bones), 2018, Oil on Linen | Lumin Wakoa