The Painter Who Painted Blue, by Meg Pokrass

Monochrome Blue, by Yves Klein (France) 1959

The Painter Who Painted Blue

He painted blue and it didn’t mean anything which felt like a relief after so much caring and that’s what he probably liked best about it.

Everything was too complicated, like his mother’s blue eyeshadow and his dad’s blue absence, and he wished as a child that he could paint every one of the family sadnesses blue. 

He stood in his own doorway often, staring out at the blue coloured promise of many blue coloured walls.

He was handsome in a Buster Keaton kind of way, which made many unattached women feel blue.

You can turn empty space into gold, he told the public, but he didn’t do that. He turned empty space into blue. 

His famous monochrome symphony of one-note paintings made even his critical mother feel proud.

He may have been known as “the man who used to be blue inside.”

He overthought everything unless it became blue, and the heart in his chest pumped out pieces of sky.

Meg Pokrass

​Meg Pokrass is the author of numerous flash fiction collections, an award-winning collection of prose poetry,  two novellas-in-flash, an award winning collection of prose poetry, and a 2020 collection of microfiction, Spinning to Mars, which won the Blue Light Book Award. Her work has appeared in  Electric Literature, Washington Square Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Split Lip and McSweeney's has been anthologized in New Micro (W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015) and The Best Small Fictions 2018 and 2019. She serves as Founding Co-Editor of Best Microfiction and Festival Curator of Flash Fiction Festival U.K. and teaches flash fiction online and in person. Find out more at megpokrass.com.
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