Poem of the Week | March 09, 2026

Jarrett Moseley was a finalist for poetry in The Missouri Review’s 2025 Editors’ Prize. He is a bisexual poet living in Miami and the author of the chapbook Gratitude List (Bull City Press, 2024). His manuscript, Rehumanization Litany, was chosen by Major Jackson as an honorable mention for the Vanderbilt University Literary Prize and earned an honorable mention for the Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer fellowship. His poems have won awards from the Baltimore Review and the Academy of American Poets and have been longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. Individual poems have been published in Ploughshares, AGNI, and elsewhere. 

“Color Theory” by Jarrett Moseley is our Poem of the Week.

Color Theory

All the mangos 
are dying on the branch. 
Hannah calls 
too late to say 
she met a horticulturist  
who had a fix. 
The green fruit rots. 
Your face was fading 
from my memory 
until I saw you again 
last week. 
Graveyard opened 
to the returning Florida heat.  
A bookstore burning 
orange in the spring afternoon 
light. 
All year I think about color 
as a choice the mind makes 
to make sense of absence. 
Like the bright red blood 
I lose 
on the sidewalk 
when attacked by a dog 
a week after we part. 
I practice loss. 
I read a book that begins 
all the images will fade  
and become afraid 
of walking beneath palm trees. 
You do not call 
and offer me a brand-new calendar 
to tack up on my wall.  
On the document 
I send to a friend 
every comment I leave 
autocorrects to 
I resolve to love you 
like collecting . . . 
and I have no idea why 
or how to erase it.  
Did you hold me 
even after you couldn’t anymore? 
Even after you knew 
you couldn’t anymore? 
I collect colors 
in your absence: 
blue of the Miami sky 
green of dogshit 
red-brown of dying 
blossoms 
on the mango tree. 
Over the phone, 
my mother: 
you knew it would hurt. 
What’s hurt? 
The beautiful olive door 
downstreet painted 
a piss-bright baby blue? 
The humidity gathering 
like desire 
to chip away 
at the new paint? 
I don’t want to make you 
my enemy 
just to stop wanting  
to make you my enemy.  
And when I see you 
you tell me 
you were bit by a dog too 
and the same breed 
and the same week 
and I love you.  
We have lost blood 
without calling. 
All the colors will fade. 
Turn off the sun. 
I find myself 
speaking to no one, writing 
a letter to no one.  
And the mangos 
are not dying 
because the mangos 
never grew. 
And Hannah says 
cut away the branches 
cut away the leaves 
cut away anything 
that looks dead. 
I have no argument 
but to write 
the returning heat 
and read it as 
the returning heart 
and lie down on the grass. 
And lie down on the grass. 
And speak to you 
through a purple afternoon. 
Purple from everything 
all at once 
holding its breath.  

Author’s Note

When you experience a great loss, everything becomes imbued with its color. You try to ground yourself in the physical world only to find that the physical world has become charged with metaphor. The mango tree that won’t blossom is as personal as a dog attack. A repainted door takes on the same significance as advice from your mother. Everything points, somehow, back to that greater loss. The same way that “color” is actually just the light an object reflects—in other words, the light it cannot hold—the whole world becomes a mirror reflecting back to you what you no longer have.