National Poetry Month
"Green Crayons"
By Martha Schaller, U-M LSA Student, @martha.schaller

Toddlers can put green crayons in the freezer without
anybody questioning them and I
have a problem with that.
I have a problem with the fact that toddlers can put
green crayons in the freezer and tell their parents that they are
preserving the Earth and that they’ve been learning about
animal adaptations and conjunctions in school
and that they love their friends.
I have a problem with the fact that a
toddler’s idea of
beauty
is a butterfly landing on their finger during
recess, a snowflake on their tongue, the
grogginess of staying up past 8:30,
Scooby snacks, Dora the Explorer,
the satisfaction of scraping the
first chunk out of a tub of butter, the
giddiness and fear at a first sleepover,
the one where a friend had to be timidly shaken
awake in the dead of night because the bathroom was
nowhere in sight.
I’m not ashamed to admit that
I haven’t said I love you in a time that
lingers like the smell of burning beetles in a lamp.
It’s always love you or love ya and I’ve
forgotten what it feels like for those words to
caress my lips, to guide my heart
out of its cage into the
stale air.
I want to be considering beauty like a
toddler. I want to be watching Swiper and Boots argue and
singing along to School House Rock, but instead I’m
crying because I can’t fit into my jeans right and I
don’t know how to do makeup. I want to say
I love you
and let it ring in the air like
frozen music
but I can’t
even though you’re only a desk away and instead
I comb my hair so many times for people who
don’t even like me that
there’s no personality left.
I have a problem with the fact that
I can’t ever find a way to tell you how much
I appreciate you
and that Dora the Explorer is not on Netflix
anymore and that the price of Happy Meals goes
up every day like the
age of my heart and that
toddlers can put green crayons in the freezer without
anybody questioning them and say that
they
are preserving the Earth.