The Chromatic Uprising

A dear friend once told me

that my true colors chew through canvases

and lick the sky.

I bled blue once,

not metaphorically, but literally,

after an argument with a lemon

about whether grief

is best expressed in chartreuse.

My body,

that overenthusiastic color wheel,

decided lavender was the new language

of inflammation.

My kidneys swelled

like lilac drama queens

in velvet gowns clutching pearls

while my intestines

recited Shakespeare backwards

in violet hues

only bees can interpret

while upside-down.

I met a man once

(four of him actually)

each one wore a different facade

like a scarf.

One loved me in grayscale,

old-timey and nostalgic,

another in ultraviolet,

so much unseen,

one loved me all sepia-toned,

it just wasn't what I wanted to see.

But the last?

He was pure glitch.

His touch tasted like TV static

and forgotten childhood dreams.

We made love beneath inverted prisms

and woke up inside

a crayon factory on strike.

When it was over,

I stopped seeing color for a week.

Some days,

I am periwinkle rage,

with slivers of silver rays.

Other days,

I am the soft off-white

of a folded fast food napkin.

I do not wear color;

I leak it,

I weep it,

I gift it to strangers in elevators

as small, vibrating eggs

that hatch into questions like,

“Is your anxiety more of a burnt umber or a screaming cerulean today?”

Even now, as my cells

play musical chairs with histamines

and my ovaries sculpt cysts

in the shape of ancient hieroglyphs,

I am becoming saturated in color.

Soft coral, cosmic, and untranslatable,

the color of a sigh with a scream

and everything in between.

You ask for my true colors?

Oh sweet darling,

I’ve been vomiting them into space

since before the void

had a Pantone chart.