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MacQueen’s Quinterly: Knock-your-socks-off Art and Literature
Issue 9: August 2021
Haibun: 158 words
By Cherie Hunter Day

Pantone Unveils Its Color of the Year

 

It was supposed to be a classic mid-range blue designated as Clandestine Sky, or some other evocative variation of late-day dusk light. We need our blue to be unequivocally clean and unencumbered without a trace of coercion—a clear bell ringing all around us. We are desperate for the calming influence blue can provide. There’s gravity to it that registers as comfort like a weighted blanket.

truce at the end of the day starlight

Instead we get Apocalypse Orange, shot up like a roadway flare lighting the skid marks and crumpled metal. A smoke-filled chokehold that robs us of an entire day of sunlight. This color doesn’t warrant a name. It needs a number—a threat level. It smacks of survivor-less-ness, which leaves us searching for new coordinates. There’s no way to back out of this slowly.

wildfire
in the dry foothills
a shroud of smoke

Cherie Hunter Day
Issue 9, August 2021

is an associate editor for The Heron’s Nest. Her short prose and poems have appeared in 100 Word Story, KYSO Flash, Mid-American Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Modern Haiku, Moon City Review, Quarter After Eight, SmokeLong Quarterly, Unbroken, and Wigleaf. Her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is anthologized in Nothing Short of 100 (Outpost 19, 2018), Accidents of Light: KYSO Flash Anthology 2018 (KYSO Flash Press), and NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems (Isobar Press, 2019).

Recent collections include a prose poem e-chapbook, Qualia (White Knuckle Press, 2017), and a collection of short poetry, for Want (Ornithopter Press, 2017). She is also the author of two award-winning haiku collections: apology moon (Red Moon Press, 2013) and The Horse with One Blue Eye (Snapshot Press, 2006).

 
 
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