My father wakes
the machines at 4 am
while drinking his coffee
heavy cream 4 sugars
He is going to die one day
Today he is making a blue
to be used in eye shadow
It’s not the same
kind of blue plastered on police cars
or the kind set in rhinestones
It all depends on the temperature
He takes his time
checking the machines
Today each drying belt
needs to be at 900 degrees
for 8 hours to get this shade
to reach its full potential
It’s important to be precise
my father says
The machines reach 455 degrees
He sweats alone through
his denim pants, a different kind
of blue made in Vietnam
He wipes his forehead
work sweat is like beach sweat
it is all evenly distributed
like a good coat of paint
When they are ready
the machines hiss at him
the alarm sounds and my father
enters the code on the keypad
It takes one man to make a good coat of paint
In eight hours slabs of blue will process
down the belt presenting themselves—
not like children at graduation
or baseball players after a big game
but as blades of grass
resurrected after a long
winter in upstate New York
where the snow is deadly
and the furnaces beat themselves
into exhaustion howling steam through blue rooms—
not mountain blue not hospital blanket blue
but the deep midnight blue
at the center of my father’s knuckles
that one Fourth of July he set his hand
on fire with a set of Pennsylvania shooters
I pressed the ice over his fingers
while he finished his beer and listed
the types of apples grown in our county