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A History of Colour
American Lawn, Alex Callender
Once leeched from lapis lazuli, now
chemically-derived, named ultramarine
blue, the most beautiful colour
is the one that doesn’t exist. The painter’s
pigments, her selection of synthetic tints hint
at the roots of cobalt, cerulean, and azurite—
opulent, lushly expressed in larger-than-life
asters and big blue stem and marsh cord grasses
overgrowing the field filling-up this canvas.
Close-ups of purple-blue flowers showcase
their black centres, massing a galaxy of stars.
Here and there, cyan blossoms erupt
into flame. The sky above all this modifies,
darkening the palette while hueing it mauve,
with dash-like strokes that conjure a meteor
raining down. Everywhere, there are
intimations of danger and grandeur,
an abundance of nature that feels utterly
unnatural. On an indigo river running
through this lurid lawn, colonial relics bob:
pages torn from an 18th-century book
of botanic drawings, chipped teacups,
a submerged, disembodied plaster head.
All are phantom presences, haunting
the surreal landscape of history’s graveyard.
Where Does a Candle Go When It Burns
40 Acres: Camp Barker, October 2023, Sandy Williams IV
By now it is long gone, the flames having consumed
the waxen Lincoln, seated in that pose made famous
by the version of him on the Mall, replicated, relocated
to this site and sculpted from material meant to perish.
On a D.C. street at dusk, I stood to watch the statue burn.
Perhaps it never existed, returned to its original state,
carbon dioxide and water evapourated into the ether,
this art that resurrects the dead with a decomposing eye.
What the artist memorialises is a habit history can’t kick.
How many remember Camp Barker, Civil-War-era grounds
that housed formerly enslaved and free Black Americans?
I don’t know where a candle goes when it burns but know
what it leaves behind is soot, shading promises unkept,
what it means to be a refugee in your own country.
Shara McCallum is the author of seven books, published in the US & UK, including Behold (2026); No Ruined Stone, winner of the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry; and Madwoman, winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry. From Jamaica and of Jamaican and Venezuelan parentage, she teaches at Penn State University.
Copyright © 2026 by Shara McCallum, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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