Doug Roy, Who II, Cut Paper
“Mummification”
Some start with early curtain when summer throws shade on harvest moon with a pre-fall nod, their flaming optics like struck matches on a brisk October night. We’re waiting on death they seem to say. We get five weeks tops. The standard palette entices mothers with disposable income and boys who work at Dollar General. It plays with mood and menace, scientists experimenting with test tubes, bioengineering colors not seen, not felt. The grimy pumpkin bastards, too many gourds with their flesh-tints, myopic stints that only god has seen. One snip of a DNA strand and the whirl spins a color wheel: fluorescent lime greens, tapioca cheese boards, brown recluse venoms, sparked on front porches in time for festivals, the summer jellies oozing into mainstream, hanging in plastic pots on rusted swing sets at Walmart, stacked on A-frame beechwood scaffoldings at ACE. All yours for purchase, the fantastic eclipsing of summer hedges, their once-green husks giving way to golden rod with its shower of reticulated pollen, gorgeous but deadly; and the regal asters with their vascular spaghetti-thin necks, the mums, ah the mums, that spurt like volcanoes then die at the end of one day in particular, a day when hardly any soul is planning for a hard freeze of heart that anesthetizes every last sepal, each colored leaf, abandoned on picnic tables, patios, and in the middle of forgotten yards and gardens, browning out each hour with extended seclusion and a cold scorching of winter’s cruel breath.
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John Dorroh