Any Color
The Universe gave me, today,
a curious child at my table.
She wanted to know,
as she sat insistently beside me,
a stranger,
what the words were that I hid.
“I’m writing,” I said.
“No you’re not. That’s not writing,” she said,
because I had switched screens
so as not to scorch her eyeballs
with my longing.
“I’m writing a poem,” I said.
“Do you know what that is?”
She said no, until I quoted “Roses are red.”
“I know that,” she said,
and my heart hopes
that’s the only version she ever knows.
She wanted to write one, too,
so she typed in her name
and had me write the rest for her:
Fries are yellow,
Cars can be any color.
For five sacred minutes,
I was free.
Drema Drudge is a novelist and poet whose work appears in journals such as The Louisville Review, Suspended Magazine, and The Tulane Review. Her poem “Mutual Mass” received a Pushcart Prize nomination, and her manuscript Waxing the Parasitical Muse was longlisted for the 2025 Idaho Prize for Poetry.