by Aaron Graham

At the violet hour, you found azure icicles hugging
The bathroom vanity—diving, splintering bodies
Resonating with D minor’s deep blue when they struck.

You picked up their shards,
Constellated them into shapes of dying stars,
And pinned them together like an antique wedding dress.

At the violet hour, they sang unrivaled eulogies
of beauty and felicity, the tonic and the subdominant
of black and grey.

This is cactus land
At the yellow chirping of the fail-safe alarms
You awoke to a dappled snow.

Cinder-speckled drifts incompletely refract
The dim light of a put-upon heaven
You began this vigil two anemic weeks ago.

Weeks when moments of indigo still seemed
To drift between ash clouds
You awaited the shadow like a guest.

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Aaron Graham is currently a doctoral student at Emory University emphasizing in intersections of neurological medicine and literature, specializing in 20th Century poetics, continental philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience. He is a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he served with Marine Corps Intelligence as an Arabic linguist.