poems painted sea foam

i.

sea foam green

a crayola color i used
to use, not for sea,
but for tracing
my mind back
to that year, being in kindergarten,
on the West Coast

ii.
sea foam green

Maybe Ireland or some mythic shoreline
is where the foam resembles the crayon,
but not in Yachats, Oregon, or anywhere I've seen.
Maybe sea foam yellowish white wouldn't be as memorable,
not as romantic, i think, while the thick foam,
more like a grotesque rabid foam, washes up the dead
limp brown weeds, in ancient rhythm,
seen as through a Viewmaster, eight hundred feet below
Cape Perpetua, a place that myths have flooded
and will flood until even its sea foam
has a color named after it.

iii.

Sea Foam Green

A wax stick that colors the sky,
giving it an ominous hue. Like that paper
day in seventh grade, tornado warnings dopplering,
in the concrete block basement,
the school huddling in the cafeteria, under
unearthly fluorescent lights with roaches stuck in them,
amazed at the anticipation in the sudden electric,
wildlife hiding and waiting for mass destruction,
kids looking through slits for windows,
into the inside-out of ordinary,
into unpasteurized atmosphere, and
sea foam green is suddenly lifted from
rocky, fluorescent and mossy imagination,
sea foam green, still embedded in those ethereal
seventh grade walls.