My Cardboard Balcony

Living In Sepia by Belinda Roddie This brown medicine doesn't make me feel better; it just turns the broth in my intestines just as brown and leaves me hiccuping in my bed with mud brown sheets and a mud brown comforter and all this mud filling up the sinuses leading to my mud-filled brain; to my mud-filled memories. I sink in the swamp of beige and spit out clotted lumps of life while my arms are dunked in Mother Nature's dipping sauce for her kale chips. Does she toast her dinners with a glass of the ocean? Do crabs swim in the crystalline flute? She's made this world very beautiful. Autumn reds and spring greens suit her. Even the winter whites and summer yellows are worth a glance. Mother wouldn't appreciate a canvas scraped apart with gravel and dirt. I don't like being forced to consume anything that results in my colors dulling. Leave the earth tones to the earth; I shoot rainbows between my teeth for fun, beat my brothers

She kept her boat close to the shore, the salt in her lungs and bits of kelp in her hair. She tugged at the ropes so that the sails could breathe a little in the night air. It was cold and dreary out; the skies were tinged with the sort of gray that was dull and mournful, as if drained of color many days ago. She could see the moon, but barely, as it hung like a limp pearl among dimmed stars.