Write a catalog or list poem that meditates on a color and an emotion experienced throughout the day—blue and joy, yellow and grief, red and satisfaction, pink and flirtatiousness—without using the name of the color or emotion in the body of the poem.

Alternatively: disobey the prompt, and name the color and emotion. But maybe try it first without naming. And read Mary Ruefle’s poem “YELLOW SADNESS” below.

YELLOW SADNESS by Mary Ruefle

Yellow sadness is the surprise sadness. It is the sadness of naps 
and eggs, swan’s down, sachet powder and moist towelettes. It 
is the citrus of sadness, and all things round and whole and dying 
like the sun possess this sadness, which is the sadness of the 
first place; it is the sadness of explosion and expansion, a blast 
furnace in Duluth that rises over the night skyline to fall 
reflected in the waters of Lake Superior, it is a superior joy and 
a superior sadness, that of revolving doors and turnstiles, it is 
the confusing sadness of the never-ending and the evanescent, 
it is the sadness of the jester in every pack of cards, the sadness 
of a poet pointing to a flower and saying what is that when what 
that is is a violet; yellow sadness is the ceiling fresco painted 
by Andrea Mantegna in the Castello di San Giorgio in Mantova, 
Italy, in the fifteenth century, wherein we look up to see we are 
being looked down upon, looked down upon in laughter and 
mirth, it is the sadness of that.

from My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016)

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Han VanderHart is a queer writer living in Durham, NC and the editor of Moist Poetry Journal. They are the author of Larks (Ohio University Press, 2025), winner of the 2024 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, the chapbook Hawk & Moon (Bottlecap Press, 2025), and What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021), and have poetry and essays published in Poetry Daily, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, AGNI, and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry Podcast and co-edits River River Books.