Indigo (New Voices 2011 Version)

On December 14, 2010, this poem was accepted into the Bemidji State University New Voices anthology for 2011. More information on New Voices can be found here.

It also won the Langston Hughes Prize for Poetry.

Who would have known that,
as we wandered in the wilderness,
our hearts were collecting colored sand
grain by
grain?
Purple dust filled
the gaps between
your ribcage and your lungs,
and tiny bits of royal blue
sifted through the cracks in my spine,
muffling the beat of my heart.
They threw us together and
while we collided,
the hinges of our bones must have broken and
rolled back our skin like the stone from the tomb.
Our hard-won sand went skittering along the ground and,
while we scrambled to reclaim it,
it attracted to itself,
mingling until we could no longer find our own.
So call it fate or call it
indigo,
it amounts to the same:
no one has called me a truer name
than the one in your eyes that you never speak.
Someday will we wear our finger raw,
picking apart the colors?
Leave half the grains behind and
emerging diminished,
but entirely our own again.
I doubt it.
Something changed in our collision,
and something became;
Rather than walking away from it
as halves of some whole,
we walked away complete.