Poet's Statement: This poem’s earliest draft was an exercise assigned by Gaby Calvocoressi. I was taking her poetry and watercolor workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in the summer of 2016, where we spent each day painting as non-painters, making mistakes, and writing. I’d had a long stretch of writer’s block, and being allowed to play with paint let me relax about each poem being “good.” The assignment was to write something that included the colors of a painting exercise we had done, as well as to write toward, then beyond, a previous poem of ours.

The colors in the poem – as well as some painting vocab, it seems – came from the watercolors. My previous poem was “The Ray,” which I’d had published just a few months prior. I don’t remember exactly why I chose it, but it was likely the last poem I’d finished that I still felt good about. I’d also just come from a week visiting my wife’s family in Maine, where we are lucky enough to spend a lot of time on the ocean. I have a deep and lifelong love/awe of the ocean and its secrets, but as a Northern California resident, actually swimming in it is a luxury I am not regularly afforded.

Bio: Caroline Mei-Lin Mar is a high school teacher and poet. A San Francisco native, Carrie is doing her best to keep her post-gentrification hometown queer and creative. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, an alumna of VONA Voices workshop, and a member of Rabble Collective. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, New England Review, CALYX, and Anomaly, among others.