The First Yellow

The first yellow is a wall of forsythia along the sidewalk on the way to the bus stop to drop off my brother and to pick my brother up after school. March, so it glows against gray, mom singing “Here comes Peter Cottontail.” The bunny gray, too, as the sky. The second yellow is schoolbus, an angrier rumble than the New York taxi I had no cash to hail two decades later. Whose fault? Asphalt. The third is Mother’s Day roses and the songs I confused: wasn’t Texas a bad planet and didn’t oak ribbons stand not for Iran hostages but to romanticize the military? Dad said not to do that though he started reading in earnest in the navy. Vonnegut. What’s that sound? Early on, buttercups underchin proved a crush on neighbor David who soon moved to Pittsburgh. No child understands why dandelion is called weed, no girl why she is wallflower. Their blown seed defines whole summers, yellow as the silky nightgown I wear from five to eight, each year creeping closer to my knee, but not too close as staying small is my superpower. I fit through things. The tropical wallpaper in the kitchen in the half-double and that other wallpaper in literature class—jungle and prison. Yellow is dippy eggs and potato bread, what I started with, and the coffee stains that span my midlife, its menopausal belly. Yellow is what happens if I make it far enough, someone else setting the finish line as if for company. I could be done by now. I am running on a double yellow, not passing anyone, sometimes walking. When I crawl I am following the negative space between, narrowing in. On hot days the tar weeps up almost to say hello. But then, no, that’s me, my skinned knees wanting iodine. I think I’m crying.