Color Correction by Peggy Yin (18, New York)*

At the cash register, 
I clutch color correctors and pennies 
and a fistful of stray dollars 
and a “Good, how are you?” that 
lolls in my mouth, wet and empty 
like the oranges and greens I hold 
so I will not have to explain anything 
to anyone 
if they ask 
What happened? ​

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I painted autumn on my skin, and beat it with the cream of dead leaves and dirt, a sort of brown butter that smoothed uneven mounds away, 
then blended in rain until the colors had faded clean. 

We were alone in the locker rooms, 
The day I said I fell, 
Tucking errant fabrics in through the slits of lockers 
ruddy and raw, laced with the smell of uric leather and rust. 
She watched me put away my color correctors, and wondered 
what kind of fall 
looked like that. 

I lied. 
In the little lilac office, 
On a couch too contrived to be comfortable, 
With Master’s degrees hanging behind a printer, a computer, 
A screen of incompletes, of 0s— 
an oval of a concerned mouth, and tired lashes that raked me, those glazed whites of a story heard too many times. 
She asked to see—as if seeing 
would help her understand 
what happened. 

It was in the bathroom—the first time 
—Or the kitchen, 
I don’t remember. 

But it was in the spring—the last time, 
holding empty tubes and change 
that the wrong hues bloomed up before me: 
                    Garnet in seafoam 
                    Lilies in sunshine 
and I corrected their color.

​