You crave pistachio ice cream
like a pregnant woman,
your hands in the freezer
rummaging
aching for green.
You think back to that ice cream parlour
by Lake Garda – Riva was it? –
a rainbow of gelato under glass.
You remember the choice,
darting right and left,
a promise to go back
until you had both savoured
everything.
Another promise
broken.
You hadn’t even finished the top row
before it was time to come home,
stuck in grapefruit and lemon,
in coffee and raspberry cream.
No pistachio.
You want pale green lips,
you want fresh and cold and crunch of nut
but all the freezer yields up
is the most mundane
so you eat vanilla anyway – all of it –
and when you bring it back up, ten,
fifteen minutes later,
(the way you bring
everything back these days,)
you are relieved it is not green
because you remember then –
how could you have forgotten? –
that it was on the Italian holiday
scanning an iced rainbow of hard-to-choose
when she told you her favourite colour
was pistachio green.