By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art by Claire Bateman

I cannot tell you how green the hills are
because I have only one tongue,
and you also are unable to taste green.
I mean ur-green, as in green that knocked up green
and spawned a neon bastard green that polite people
turn away from. Green that can’t be trapped
in a thumb, but multiplies in the body like a virus.
Not greens to cure indigestion, but Verde!
a serrano tampiqueño that plants
an ulcer in the soft folds of your stomach;
a little mouth that won’t stop speaking
the fiery truth. The green that buckled
Saint Patrick’s knees when he was yet a slave
in a foreign land. Conversion green, in other words.
Not an argument, but an abiding conviction
that the charges against us are true.
A “we hold this green to be self-evident” green.
A green to shock mustard into constellation.
Not the Masters blazer, but this new rain jacket
I pull over my daughter’s shoulders
before she leaves for fourth grade
on the greenest day of the rest of her life.
It’s a green I try to imagine her wearing
when she buries me in the brown earth and remembers
the day her father clothed her in Amazon green—
a green that was all the rage.

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Craig van Rooyen’s poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Best New Poets, Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, and elsewhere. He lives on the Central California Coast and has an MFA from Pacific University.