Kyle Hemmings



The City Dreams Too

There’s a Sexy Dummy in My Bed #1

She sends emails to a hacker in Detroit. The hacker promises monogamy but truth feels like overripe lemons falling from windows. At a bar with faulty fire exits, she tells this leather-clad guy that she's not a cougar. In bed, he appears blonder and more vulnerable. His eyes are sleepy, blue. She believes he could change identities like an inept spy. "You need more fiber in your diet," he says pulling a sheet up to the ring piercing his one nipple. Later, she's mesmerized by the way he can cut a lemon in quarters. At the same bar next week, he doesn't remember her, but she can still feel his sticky hands. Alone, the reflection of a gibbous moon is trapped inside her room. She makes coffee to keep her awake, to keep a vigilance on intruders posing as sleepwalkers posing as hungry bedwetters.

Anybody's Girl

There’s a Sexy Dummy in My Bed #2

I believed my lover of two weeks was trying to poison me. She kept taking photos of me next to water hydrants. I placed Freudian interpretations over everything. Her father, her ex-boyfriend, died drowning in water or air. Even in death, went her favorite line from some Romanian movie about a campus sniper, we should never be lonely. I showed her my mother's expensive porcelain tea cups, the ones with birds and tiny Chinese brush strokes. She kept running her fingers along the bodies, over the hairline cracks, smiling sadly, as if everything for one day revolved around me.

Lonely Girl with Threads

There’s a Sexy Dummy in My Bed #3

I never thought of time in that way. Not linear as in Disney movies or long lines at a kiosk where they're giving away free autobiographies. Kind of like an elliptical bubble. Certain things repeat themselves but in different guises: animal faces, the wrong gesture with the right heirloom, a girl who resembles Theresa Wright who resembled your mother who claimed in her last years that she never bore you or that you were someone else's RKO twin. When you step out of the bubble, time dissipates and becomes space. If you read closely between these lines, you'll hear the endless hum of an old movie projector.

Expressionistic You

Kyle Hemmings has been published in Wigleaf, Storyglossia, Elimae, Match Book, This Zine Will Save Your Life, and elsewhere. His latest collections of prose/poetry are Void & Sky from Outskirt Press and City of Kats from Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing. He lives and writes in New Jersey.
 
 
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