And what if colour was a body you could split apart? to dream in fields of poppies and amaranths, those mountains in miniature, floating soft in songs woven fresh and quiet to live inside the contours of memory fed on the drops of half-drunk dreams. So! Now you can see the shapes as echoes. The sky comes streaming down in spools of colour, and we all have to ask, have to wonder why the symphony’s still blaring, for whom each song has been strung for, for there is a boy shoveling gallons of paint into the blaze of his eyes, and soon, when he speaks, we will not recognise him at all. He, as the splitting of light. He, as the bursting of brightness. What is it to see the inside of colour, torn apart? And after all, how do we understand what he has become? You rise up to speak to him and when you come back down to share it with the others you find you have no words to speak into existence that which was told. How can you explain something which does not have shape? What string does not break apart when you are lowered back to the heaving earth? Let it stay divine, let it stay suspended, exiled in the body of its remembrance.
Julia Retkova is a King’s College London graduate student with two degrees in Literature and Digital Studies. When not working on an app that connects foreigners with their family overseas, she’s running a small literary journal called Nymphs. She was born in Ukraine, but grew up in the south of Spain. She loves reading books in the sun and writing when everyone’s asleep 🙂
Amethyst Review 