You Can Convince Yourself of Anything
It’s all true. These lies. Isn’t that how
we keep going? The carob you handed me is fake
chocolate like the laughter of sitcoms and the hooves
of a thousand horses thumping in our hearts.
Cut me some slack. You call this love?
Above the sky is white, not blue, and the one
man who calls me is from United Healthcare.
I like to believe I say what I must
the only way possible. I have a home.
It is penurious. Like time.
An hour in any direction appears hungry
or twisted with rage, like the body
of the girl I procrastinate to remember
even though a piece of her body repeats
several times in the living room, her arms,
boxes of Raisin Bran and dollhouses in other homes.
It’s time to learn what everyone not spent
in girlhood learns. The body is so many
parts, strewn among poker-faced
lusts too intense and nasty to end
anyplace but a soup kitchen, a shady gallery
of breasts. Do you have spare parts to sell?
I do. The window reads cook wanted, not cock
needed. When I told you I love you, I meant
get lost, cheater. The man with a dark turban
and unibrow emptied me of orgasms a year ago,
and training bras too. He sped off to Oxford
in an orange Camry with ten bottles of Miller Light
and a suntanned escort so stunning I screamed.
Mozart never played me his Jupiter Symphony.
Silence is the song of the stratosphere and
the archangels’ nocturnal cry. The fox ate Little
Red Riding Hood. I live in her Grandma’s cottage
in Cambridge. I am no girl and spent nothing
in girlhood that might clarify this penury
of chilly change from one minute to another, from body
to one more replica of the same body
I will never use. The dark-turbaned asshole wasn’t here.
When they knocked down the door, he left
with a bagful of Sheetrock and my sister.
Her name was hope. I never knew his.
It’s safer somewhere else with legs, in other homes.
I want to be set free next door,
to squeeze my face against the strange warmth
of brass whose quiet could not love me less.
Grace Lynn
Grace Lynn is an emerging queer painter who lives with a chronic illness. Her work, forthcoming in Superlative, The Ekphrastic Review, JAMA, Sky Island, Thimble Lit, Sheila-Na-Gig, Up the Staircase Quarterly and other outlets, explores the intersections between faith, the natural world, art and the body. In her spare time, Grace enjoys listening to Bob Dylan, reading suspense novels and investigating absurd angles of art history.