Tie Dye in July
Written: July 24, 2026 for a contest sponsored by: Anthony Bianco
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July begins in raucous yowl and heat,
a frolicking flare across the asphalt’s sheen.
Kine in distant fields flick flies,
and in the cul-de-sac
a bucket, a hose, a heap of white cotton
waits for the vindication of color.
We twist the shirts — tight torque,
tiny hollow-spirals of fabric —
circumspect fingers, wanton in intent,
pinching, binding, shaping craquelure futures
in the folds.
Rubber bands bite as quiet ordinances,
sharp rings that mark the places
where dye will vociferate.
Magenta, cyan, sacrosanct yellow —
a maelstrom in plastic bottles.
We quaff the sight,
mellow mingling
of menacing tidal wave
as if color were a genus of cyanide
we willingly sip,
whimsical, wimpy
yet fertile with fearless fire.
The first squeeze:
a smother of shimmering soul,
sequins of sun on the spill,
tinsels of July glinting in the runnels.
Mid-line, my mind rhymes with it —
squiggle, July's emerald, and the sky—
and I feel the salient shift:
this is not mere foofaraw,
not shallow teasing.
Petalled haze blends with pale pinks,
prickly peonies pop up on cotton fields.
The shirts become gardens —
lucid, lurid,
a hedonic hortyard of hue
Yet under all the frolicking
a saturnine undertow persists:
patterns fade,
maelstroms mellow,
every vivid vaporous longing
drifts toward bereft uncanny.
And in the rinse water —
the runoff of magenta and cyan —
a furtive echo rises.
Color drains from cloth
the way it drains from faces
in rooms faraway from July,
where sacred cells turn rebellious,
where bodies chart on patterns
they never asked to bear.
The spirals in the shirts
mirror spirals in the blood.
Somewhere, in a distant oncology ward,
July is just another month
of cautious scans and saturnine charts.
I ponder that as the dye runs,
how malignancy is its own maelstrom,
how color there is measured in bruises,
in a flow of cells on slides.
Tie-dye becomes a waggish answer,
a rambler refusal
to let the world grow purely dystopian.
We rinse.
The hose hisses — a mellifluous snake —
and the shirts yowl with sudden cold.
Hollow-pools of pigment quell into grass,
sequins of magenta in the scree of clippings.
The patterns emerge, sapient and salient,
each spiral a quietus of surprise,
each stripe a furtive augury
of how chaos can be coaxed
into something almost coherent.
Heart-honed hums amid action—
for other Julys, other tie dyes,
in the scriptorium of memory.
Yet here, now,
the shirts drip as dwarfish galaxies
on the clothesline,
sun-tinsel stalled in their spider web.
Tie-dye in July:
a wanton, lucid debacle of purity,
histrionic healing hymn,
a sapient synergy of scree and sky.
And in these spirals —
bright, brazen, vociferate —
I sense a quiet ordinance against despair,
a soft insurgency of color
that insists on returning
even in saturnine seasons.
We wear them later,
our bodies becoming moving canvases,
our swinging, sloppy steps
and the world — for a moment —
loosens its grip.
The dystopian hush recedes.
The hallowed sun leans close.
And July in all its frolicking foofaraw,
feels almost merciful again —
as if color itself were a tiny,
sage-souled reprieve
from everything that aches.
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