June Is Brown
Anisa Sanchez
Anisa Sanchez, a sophomore at Lincoln High School in San José, is the runner-up for the Reed Magazine: Issue 152 Emerging Writers Young Voices Contest. She says she hopes to become a better person and a better poet everyday.
Color is not just a sight
it often invites a feeling, a sense, a memory
Red
for instance
a shiny brownish mud of grief.
or the red metal of the car accident
that took your brother’s life in the fourth grade
Green
of the yellow muted variant
is the taste of blood
from the time I broke my arm in the meadow
I bit the inside of my cheek
and laid, tasting iron, looking at half-dried grass
Gray
with a bit of lilac
a bit of blue
helps you recall the color of the sky when I told you
I would leave to a new school and home and day-to-day
but that you must remain
collecting colors
