Vanessa Napolitano
Yellow Cabinet
You painted the drawers with gilt handles yellow, out in the garden. Seven months pregnant, a neckerchief fashioned into a hat. Black and orange paisley in your hair and your hair long and chestnut. Your shoulders and neck pinked. The weeds grew high around you. The growing seemed to go on even as you painted, as if they came up and up with the brush. The heat painted along, everything blurred and wet. How immobile it feels to be seven months pregnant. How static the heat, but it can only have been late May.
You left them out to dry in the garden. Pale yellow and you cleaned off the handles. There were no drips on the cement, nothing for me to pick up. You didn’t give me my own brush. If there was a radio going or a lawn mower buzzing or birds chirping, I added all of that later. I can’t hear anything when I go back, but I can see and feel. The determination. Green and blue and yellow, yellow, yellow. Pink skin. A baby still in prospect. Paint dries.
Vanessa Napolitano lives in Yorkshire with her husband and daughter, and works with international students. Her work can be found in Free Verse Revolution issue V, the Invitation to Love edition of 6ress zine, the anthology Songs of Love and Strength, and the latest issue of the Wellbeing Zine for Mums.