Before the poem says anything about screaming, a knife is already under the skin. "Now that" makes the cut sound like a precondition, as if the speaker has been waiting for it and can finally begin working. The poem never says whose skin it is. The speaker might be wounded, or might be the one holding the blade. The next line makes the ambiguity sharper: "I explore, with cutting edge." The phrase puns on a literal edge and on "cutting-edge" research, so the speaker is both a surgeon and an investigator. The coolness of that voice, a scientist's calm laid over a violent act, sets the poem's tone.
What the speaker investigates is "the history of the scream," and the title's "No. 6" suggests this is one entry in a longer series, though the poem itself gives no more detail. The investigation becomes anatomical. The scream travels along "the runway of the tongue and deep back mouth," and the aviation metaphor is striking. A runway is built for speed and takeoff, so the scream becomes something that gathers force and then leaves the body. The "piercing point that launches" it works as another double meaning. A knife has a point, and a scream is described as piercing. The same words serve both the blade and the sound, which suggests the two are one event.
The most unsettling image comes next: "the lungs that have no saliva to give, / no tears to distribute." Lungs make neither saliva nor tears, so the line reads less as biology than as a statement about emptiness. This scream is dry. It brings no wet relief, no crying that eases the pain. The verb "distribute" is also odd. It belongs to offices and warehouses, not to grief, and it makes the missing tears sound like a supply the body has run out of. Even suffering is described in the language of administration.
Structurally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter. Its rhythm comes from line length and breath. The first stanza is one long, unpunctuated run of clauses, with lines swelling toward "the runway of the tongue / and deep back mouth." The reader has to keep going without a full stop, much as a scream keeps going while the air lasts. The lack of capital letters and final punctuation adds to this. Nothing is formally closed, and the poem simply stops once the scream is out.
The typography does the most daring work. The word appears twice as "sscccrrrreeeeaaaaaam," stretched across the page so the eye must travel through it at the pace of the voice. The opening hiss of "ss" and the rolled "rrrr" imitate breath tightening in the throat, and the long vowels imitate the sound opening up. Here the word stops describing a scream and tries to be one. Around it the poem is full of hard, clipped sounds, in "knife," "skin," "cutting," "piercing point," so the sentence itself seems to have an edge.
The second stanza is only three lines, and it changes the poem's direction. The pharynx becomes "an open black cave," a space of darkness and echo. Then, when the scream leaves, the cave "transforms to an unknown color." This answers the title's question, "What Is the Color of a Scream?", by refusing to answer it. The question assumes that sound can be seen, a kind of synesthesia, and the poem accepts that premise. It then admits that the color has no name. Ordinary language, with its stock of red, blue and black, has no word for it.
That refusal is the center of the poem. The speaker begins with the confidence of a researcher, cutting, exploring and mapping the throat like terrain. At the crucial moment the vocabulary fails, and the word "scream" itself stretches and distorts, as if the page could not hold it. So the poem is both an anatomy of a scream and a demonstration of what lies beyond analysis. Cold language can trace the route the sound takes, but it cannot say what the sound is.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It treats a scream as an object of history and study, which is a strange and slightly chilling idea, and then lets the scream defeat the method. The reader is left in the dark cave of the throat, looking at a color that has no name.