Purple Number Poem by MARINA GIPPS

You play my hand and you play football.
Your easy gravy, warm eyeful captain,
with a colorful lens for highschool.

I see your women. They raise hands
unaware of a final salute, surrendering
nudity to your swim of blue.

Your stroke-you brush the camel's hair,
soothe the painlessness of white-washed
windows.

And our walls tell the negative of paper,
your development: clothed in the dark
of holding hands you potbellied

those years. Here, too, in our stiffening collars-
evidence of your mother's starch, or what?
The hot, speckled sun?