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Gilbert Allen reads
Flesh
in RealAudio format.
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I’m painting the new master bedroom with
a color I can’t quite identify.
It looked great on the sample sheet. Peach? Pink?
Beige? All three?
Nordic Mist, the can insists. Until I
remember the color—from the Crayola box
of my almost-middle-class childhood. Flesh.
And how it matched
my skin, if not quite perfectly, well then
well enough to escape my notice. And I
now wonder, as I never had before,
about my
classmates who stared at that dull stick of color,
and at that name, and drew upon themselves,
to behold not camouflage but something
different. Worse
or better? And who had the big box at home?
For them, Flesh would’ve been concealed in others’
mittens. Even if they’d ripped it off, it would’ve
remained pointless
and perfect—something for their little brother
to put into his mouth, on their command,
and crush between his teeth. Never becoming
funny or grand
as they’d imagined, just a goddamn mess
they could’ve melted on the radiator
in the schoolhouse that’d already taught them
to know better.
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