A world without distraction
You don’t know a world without distraction,
so at first you don’t know what to make
of the simple forms splashed with pure, bold color.
But you look again
and see
In the orange and blue: Alaska’s pristine Bristol Bay
teeming with salmon, lifeblood of the wilderness,
no open pit mining project on the table.
In the red: Bradley Manning’s private heart, pulsing brighter and truer
when they strip him naked in the brig at Quantico and brand him
a traitor for telling the truth about war.
In the yellow: shiny, expectant faces and playful laughter in Ms. Soto’s
Sandy Hook classroom before the dark visitor came.
These are the shapes.
These are the colors that remain.
These are the spaces between the places
that are too much filled with the world.
—Fran Zell
