Endless blue ward hallway.
A long blue
nothing like stretch of sky or sea.
To say I remember it
exactly would be untrue.
Sweet, hard, scuffed blue.
Black plastic specks like
dirt. Blue
floor worn down to dirt-
white in patches as
end-summer field.
I had a plush toy rabbit fur worn down
that blue.
They say the sky blues
because blue light scatters
more. It travels in smaller, shorter waves.
There are waves
to what I remember about the light
& blue. Through the sealed window the sun
made a yellow parallelogram
on the blue.
I wanted to save her—my mother
so beautiful
blue in her delphinium
dressing gown held together
by blue plastic snaps.
Bonnie Jill Emanuel is the author of Glitter City (Cornerstone 2024). She earned an M.F.A. from The City College of New York, where she received the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing and the Irwin and Alice Stark Poetry Prize. Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere.
Image: “Blue Flowers Part 2” by Maisie Weissman
Pine Hills Review 