Frankly, it makes it hard
to concentrate on the task
at hand, so to speak, sitting
on the throne, looking into
a mirror on the inside of
a pink Frigidaire roughly
the same age as me.

But I love it.

Somehow I failed to appreciate
pink as a girl, though I slept in
a pale pink bedroom and rode
a rosy two-wheeler.

The budding feminist in me
came to shun the stereotypical
pink, much as I stopped writing
poems once I got serious about
journalism.

(Who ever heard of a Real
Journalist who liked pink?)

But every time I hit the ladies’
room at Tiki Iniki on Kauai,
there it is: the doorless
Frigidaire, rusty in places
and losing its once vibrant
color.

I am fascinated by its chrome
detailing and wonder if it
always had a mirror in it,
and whose kitchen it lived in,
and who decided it would
make a whimsical decoration
in the bathroom of a tiki bar?

(Wait a minute: Clark Kent,
mild-mannered reporter
and man of steel, liked pink
and in the movie told Lois
Lane that he did, making
her blush.)

The journalist in me has a lot
of questions, but the poet,
thinking of her 1950s pink
Royal typewriter at home,
looks in the old splotched
mirror and sees her own
rosy T-shirt,

and, before leaving the loo,
pats the old gal on her
dented side and tells her
her how beautiful she is,
a treasure of her era, in
her glorious pink dotage.