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Glaucous
Sara Eddy

On the way to Albuquerque we saw a sign
that said ←COINS / (something)→ and we laughed
but now in Vermont I can’t remember what something was.

So I go on Google Maps. I drop the little consenting yellow person
down on the highway and ask them to look around with me.
It’s a fool’s errand (not the yellow they/them, they’re just doing their job).

We pass ALOHA RV, and a Sheriff’s car unable to pull us over,
a cyclist risking the state highway, and all that dusty silvery grey-green sage.
There’s a botanical word for that, but I can’t remember it, so I open

a new tab. I end up in an article about olive trees written by an Italian
botanist in 1993, and then in a list of botanical terms
like aculeate, smaragdine, esquamulose (“not covered in scales

or scale-like objects; having a smooth skin or outer covering”).
So I ask Peri, who says “the botanical words describe the physical
characteristics that create the color.” It’s too early in the day for that.

Finally Google just starts throwing words at me, hoping one will stick:
pluviosity, shalloon, tricenarian, eudaemonic (“living life with a sense
of direction”). Google is just trolling me now. I still haven’t found

the word for that unearthly verdigris that nearly made me sob with beauty
when we drove down from Denver, so I flip back to my yellow friend and toodle
down the road a ways searching for the easy laugh before I realize

we’ve gone the wrong way for miles and miles and miles.

—
Sara Eddy is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Tell the Bees (A3 Press, 2019) and Full Mouth (Finishing Line, 2020). She has published widely in print and online literary journals, including Threepenny Review, South85, Raleigh Review, and Pink Panther, among other venues. She is Assistant Director of the writing center at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and lives in nearby Amherst with a teenager, a black cat, and a white dog.

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Have you read these poems:
Grandma Enema by Paul Willis
In the Middle of the Rest of the World by Robert Okaji

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