Primary Colors by Kyle Hemmings

This is what I don’t remember: bluebonnet Sundays under Southern elm, girls whistling through tall grass, a frog, a simple cobbler, a street the width of a song. My mother in a sundress, her skin smooth as a shaved peach, a kid’s vague theory about the alignment of stars. Then the nights grew cold and other moon-ly. The door opened a creak. A man as big as a space ship. The tall shadows interrogated my father and took him to a world without cables. By morning, they returned for me and my mother. They were Green men or men with Green ideas. Green being the color of what wasn’t the temper of my blood. Then weeks stuck in the waiting rooms of the Green People. Is this how they play games? I thought. Mine were simpler and more fun. And at least you could win something. What I don’t remember: My mother filling out forms, scratching out answers, asking questions, a Green Man telling her in Broken Green what to write. In our language, my mother whispered into my good ear, “Why don’t you try to sleep. Just close your eyes and pretend you’re home.” But I never saw home again. I cursed that Green Planet of Tall Shadows. My father calling to me from some crater, from some cell at the bottom of it. Growing up, I cheated the Green Men of lifelines, I taxed whatever could be declared as Green, I rolled from one Green Woman’s bed to another until I couldn’t recognize my true color anymore in their mirrors. This is what I don’t remember: Why some colors fade to grey.

Kyle Hemmings lives in New Jersey. His work has been featured in Elimae, Thunderclap Press, Nano Fiction, Used Furniture and elsewhere. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks: Fuzzy Logic (Punkin Press), Avenue C (Scars Publications), and Amsterdam and Other Broken Love Songs (Flutter Press).