Out of the Blue, by Sandi Stromberg

International Klein Blue 79, by Yves Klein (France) 1959

Out of the Blue
 
I’m sinking into the deep blue sea, singing blue dreams, swimming in the blues, Blue Velvet and Don’t You Make My Brown Eyes Blue, descending into a French blue hour at twilight, thinking of my dad’s favorite colour—sky blue pink—and the blue moon this August when it was as hot as blue blazes, hearing echoes of Willie Nelson’s Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain, climbing Fats Domino’s Blueberry Hill, running into old ladies who aren’t blue stockinged, always bluing their hair and sharing a blue-plate special at the Hungry Ghost Diner without a Manhattan due to Blue Laws, and throwing “screwed, blued & tattooed” like a  bolt from the blue, and, oh, those blue feelings—royal, indigo, cyan, Chartres, light, dark, midnight, navy, peacock, baby—as I shuffle through blue days in Blue Suede Shoes with Elvis Presley, who never escaped the blues.
 
Sandi Stromberg

Sandi Stromberg’s inaugural full-length collection Frogs Don't Sing Red (Kelsay Books, April 2023) includes several works nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is an editor at The Ekphrastic Review and a long-time board member for Mutabilis Press, where she edited Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston; she also co-edited Echoes of the Cordillera(Museum of the Big Bend, Sul Ross State University, 2018), an anthology of ekphrastic poems in conversation with the photography of Jim Bones. Her poems have appeared recently in Panoply: The Literary Zine, San Pedro River Review, and MockingHeart Review, and translations of her poetry into Dutch can be found at Brabant Cultureel and on the website of Dutch poet, Albert Hagenaars.