wildscape. literary journal

Splashes of Monochrome
by Sui Wang

After Bhanu Kapil’s Wish (2)


It's a pupil but also a country: the way color spirals inward, a palimpsest blinking in this light. For you, it might be the glow of neon tattooing the alleyway, a white vow you once swallowed like a pill. Like you, I thread through dreams where blue glances off uneven surfaces. When I say blue, I mean the horse galloping through my sleep, vanishing into faint beats as it slips past this sentence. Improbable, yes—like the way your voice became a flock of starlings when you read to me, or how my mother’s hands, once a spring of clouds, now linger behind the door. You are writing to me from the hush of our dreams. Left behind, you dip your murmurs in residues of blue, the memory of it, staining the retina. We circle around each other like two yodels. We don’t stop until there’s more blue, until it surrenders to a streetlamp’s yawn, tucking itself back into the center of a pupil—tell me again, how color begins.

about the author // Sui Wang