The Blue That Never Stood in Line

A boy brought a parcel wrapped in wax before the first bell rang, and did not ask. I weighed it twice only to feel the weight of what I had not had to ask.

Six streets off, a woman packs green moss into her window’s seam — no coin spent, no bale bought, no one left to ask.

Her grandmother’s hands remembered a method the market forgot to sell her; the shortfall only reaches those who still have somewhere to ask.

Four hours the queue stood outside the Arcade for a parcel already gone by a door no clerk would name, let alone ask.

Sold ahead of the queue, the letter said, plainer than the paper’s own word for it — a sentence I was spared the trouble to ask.

I cut the length no other dyer saw the color of, and called the cutting craft, and did not ask.

My hands know indigo the way her hands know moss: by what arrives, by what is near, by what we never learned to ask.

Her moss cost cold water and ten fingers gone white at the second knuckle. My blue cost nothing I was made to ask.

I will make something worth the ink in beauty’s name. I will not write whose turn in the line it was. I did not ask.

Tonight the question keeps my lamp lit longer than the dye does — whose hands go white so mine never have to ask.