Colors: Take, Took, Taken
Natalie Padilla Young | Poetry
A question of two possibilities: How much
will it take?
*
The assignment: Draw yourself doing something.
I crayoned me outside playing
on the sidewalk. It was the purple hair
teacher couldn’t take, though I was only five. Even at five
bright fiction was better than (and overtaken
by) brown realism. Mrs. Basset made me color over
the original—didn’t care about the liberty
I took with curls, though my hair hung stick straight.
*
How much does one need to give
for this to work?
vs.
How much must be removed
before the something is satisfied?
*
Blood-sucking flies took so much
the zebra adapted, developed stripes. It’s hard to take in:
the first, cousin of the horse, showed up not-so-suddenly
in stark black and white; those tiny, relentless pests
of more concern than large cats with claws. Camouflage distracts
rather than hides—the flies remain, not taking
nearly as much.
Natalie Padilla Young co-founded and manages the poetry magazine Sugar House Review. She is half Puerto Rican and half Brigham Young, working as an art director for a Salt Lake City ad agency. Her first book All of This Was Once Under Water is out from Quarter Press (2023). Natalie’s poetry has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Tampa Review, Rattle, South Dakota Review, Los Angeles Times, Tar River Poetry, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. She serves on the Utah Arts Advisory and Lightscatter Press boards, and lives in southern Utah with the poet Nano Taggart and two dogs. NatalieYoungArts.com