Tayla Halfacre

Etymology of Orange

​I want to be as bold as Orange that made a name out of its very own colour. Oranges and the  blossom in Sevilla. Orange that takes courage to peel with cuts. Orange that Jeanette says is not  the only. Orange of the light that takes care of the street corners where we would hide and kiss  and become official; Orange that leaked onto buildings and licked the pavements not just in  September. Orange campsis that stained her cheek from her ear, when it was dark, and we thought  that we too could be gardens before we realised that not all of them are free, they’re shut up and  unkept by a rigid five p.m. So we walked past Rent-a-Bike in the near rain at ten to twelve down  the pitch black corners of apartments with Orange doors. A flame igniting as the crushed foxgloves  blared Nat King Cole’s Orange Coloured Sky and leaked onto the white sheets, half-dead poison  berry itch inside the bloom, marking my chest crimson from that leaking sap stinging. She said,  ‘Orange is the colour of healing’, and kissed my thighs ill. Shy segments folded away one by one,  not to be bitten into but peeled back to the pulp dripping / butterflies multiplying among the  nectar / sting / torn seeds / only growing in pressured heat anticipating courage that was out of  season. I was chewing mint for years before this sip. My tongue refuted the hidden brand new. A  bud not formed from knowing but from tasting the sourness. That sourness linger. The mask of  sweet: becoming as bold as Orange who made a name out of its very own colour, and a burn,  steady sweet, yet always bitter, somehow. 

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Tayla Halfacre is a poet and writer/director. She graduated from the University of Warwick with a BA in Creative Writing and English Literature. She recently directed her play Lesbian Line which showed at The Playhouse in Northampton in October 2022, since then she has been selected as part of the cohort for the BFI Network X Northampton Film Festival Short Script Development Programme.