Cinnabar
He comes home after dark
from his long day at the mine
way out in the Panamint Valley.
Sometimes he unpacks four or five
rocks onto the table, turns off the lamp
and calls us into the kitchen.
He plugs in the blacklight, waves it
one end to the other—all of us
peer into the dark. The red one is calcite,
he points, willemite the green.
We are looking for tungsten, for blue.
Very rare, he says. Eventually
Mama switches on the lights
pulls his dinner from the oven
complains about the lateness of the hour.
We jostle each other to bed
listen to the screen door bang
as he walks out to the yard,
brushes cinnabar from his boots.
Swoosh, swoosh,
swoosh swoosh swoosh.
Flashes of red and green pulse
behind my eyelids as I try
to imagine blue.
*
Melody Wilson is a pushcart nominated poet whose poems appear in Pangyrus, VerseDaily, The Fiddlehead, Crab Creek Review, San Pedro River Review and elsewhere. She is pursuing her MFA at Pacific University. Her chapbook, Spineless: Memoir in Invertebrates came out in 2023. Find more of her work at melodywilson.com.
