“Blue Bear,” by Idris Anderson (Poetry ’06)

2006 poetry alum Idris Anderson was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Blue Bear” below:

Blue Bear

It must be abstract but with colors,
green for the magnolia, yellow for the finches
in the white cage. Blue is the bear I stitched for you
from velour and buttons and leaned on the fence of your bed.

Already I’ve drifted into narrative
and particulars, the name of the bear I will tell you,
and the story of the stitching, the colors of zinnias tall
in your window. There are no screens between you and me

and the zinnias. I could touch them
from the chair where I sit by your bed
reading, opening the space in which you are dying,
all the world should come in, petals like paper arrows—

purple-red, pink, gold, sharp-raw
as the rasp of your breathing. Don’t die,
I’m thinking. Live so I can carry you back
to the beach, your house where I slept on the porch,

the sea pounding,
shells rattling in laps of waves,
so many in the turned-up hem of your shirt
pulled close to your heart, your small breasts

brooding metastasis.
Dying is what you wanted,
no measures, let alone extreme,
anything but this lingering drug-induced limbo.

Read this poem in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-10-idris-anderson/