Some Colours For A Friend Who Has Writer's Block
Alex MacDonald

Blue Lake is what you see just under the ocean
on postcards, where terrapins open their mouths,
a stitch unsealing, to swallow something surrounded
in grey volcanic sand. Yellow6 is actually mauve,
stripes on borlotti beans running like a footpath,
where it leads, predictably, to the other side of the bean.
Yellow5 is in super moons, in the palms of the only
two dead bodies I have seen and in adverts for hard
banana sweets. Carmine gives the cherry its vampire,
the scattered power tools their juice, the lift
its passenger: a sea of blood. And Red40, those
strawberries, is burned glass, the reflection of light
on light, the balloons trapped in train stations.