Indigo
A different kind of nature
tickles her tender five-year-old forearm.
The way she shivers in the humidity
in her pom-pom hat, ladybug rain boots,
her bright blue eyes flitting between her mother
and eighty species in eighty-degree weather in the overcrowded
butterfly room bustling with diaphanous wings,
fibrous bodies, flimsy filaments clapping in failing light.
In swarms of neon-green birdwings and starry night crackers,
she flings her head back like snowflakes are falling
from the backyard’s blustery sky with cloudbursts that match
the bruises that will swell in indigos on her bare thighs.
She thought it romantic,
a fairytale, a freshly shaken etch-a-sketch in the backseat
of Flora’s Camry pulsing with Barbie World
fried drumsticks, pale-pink ballet slippers,
the honeysuckle scent of hands in summer.
Except her mouth is parched,
her lips parted as if waiting
to fold reality into a neat chrysalis
or to become like a moth trained
to a bulb of alopecia light, coming as proximal
as possible to the aerodynamics of flight.
Double Jointed
With knees bent beside her head, I gasp
at fire-engine-red toes flickering
like streetlights at her earlobes.
Uncrossing herself, she nudges
a thumb parallel to tendons pulsing
along her wrist. Suddenly, she folds
at the loose screws of her hips to swing
the blond pendulums of her pigtail braids
between her thighs.
Darkness descends like a curtain crinkling
buttery wrappers of used light, flinging
a knee, her face unabashedly
into a snorting laugh until she is a nest
of dancing shadows on the charcoal-boiled
playground. Squatting in jeans, my vision fills
with her backbends and flirtation
with corporeal possibility in afternoon’s waltz
into eventide. I become a body
made of irises and hands. My biceps quiver
in blasts of exfoliating wind
as shocking as the first time a razor scraped
a calf of my teenage skin. My sensitive scalp prickles
with a memory of the lunchroom nurse,
her fine-tooth comb liberating lice from our hair
while we raced side by side to flip
over raspberry ices, swallowing their syrupy
undersides before they became hints
of mauve stains on our mouths
and uniform collars. During recess, we go on this way
for fifteen or fifty perfect minutes, panting
in a communion of reckless breath. She splits
her lapis-lazuli skirt into a line, exposing
the princess on her underpants. She’s ten
but this world wants to artificially outpace
her downy white hairs and still tight
baby teeth. She asks me if I remind her
of the Picasso exhibit we sneered at, riding
on the wheels at our sneakers’ squealing heels,
our parents dragging us by our wrists
from The Weeping Woman to Guernica and back
for an eternity of two hours. How we shuffled forward
and backward, leaned this way and that
along the length of our spines
like palm trees blowing
in this world’s most gentle breeze, squinting
and cocking an ear to a shoulder with the effort
to see what we thought we weren’t sufficiently
grownup to see until she said enough,
my eyes are sprained. How guards chastised us for coming
too close to what we could not believe
or our racket of doubled over
defeat. Look, she said, pointing
at the painting of arms like vectors
to an otherwise armless place.
We hunched before canvas after canvas
laying our sketchbooks on the floor, lead scattering
ant-like under our scabbed elbows.
This is what it takes
to be made right: to follow the leash
of each other’s bare hiccups, our impressions
of the world yet unformed.
Modern, Still Mary
Mary Oliver arrived at the riverbed in a golden top-
down Ferrari. More like in a canoe
or, more possibly, on her dirt-socked feet.
She mailed out invitations & blended ink
out of her blood into earth-calligraphy.
In her wedding gown of ivory & train
of hummingbirds & peonies, she chased
herons, crickets, wild geese & time
like it’s been holding us up behind
stop signs & car accidents
all our lives. It’s stellar at its job, time
I mean, at outpacing
what we think ours to save
like the body
is a nebula we can flash
freeze before its pale-pink ghostly
rays return into the atom-
wombs where wishes are made.
She tells us how we wait
in em dashes
of playground corners with heads folded
like paper cranes over poems
& picture books or our chins raised
like champagne flutes up at the sky, the bendy
straws we use to drink in the colostrum
of this planet. Praise spider-silk webs
of greying hairs & crows’ feet
nesting at the corners of a grownup
gaze. Mary’s on the usual lookout
for herons, blackbirds & cicada-
strummed autumn light. Loving
& dying, she reminds us are only ways
of living in our soft shells that come
with legs & arms speaking their own foreign language
we aren’t meant to translate. Only breathe
into the critter of your bones, maybe
make a little music as you move
along. Whatever happens to you;
a jay’s summer song, a pine’s stammering
rings of growth, a bee
sting on the sand, loss will make you
its taskmaster. No matter what happens,
you were made to break
but each new sample
of sun suffices
to put batteries in your body
up until function fails to spin
a salad or make angel’s wings
out of nothing
besides your skin & a sheet of overripe
snow. Or squat in the tall grass
on your rug-burned knees & look out
of the braces
of irises at ibises, the birches & lotus
blooms swimming with the ebb
& flow downstream. You were put here to declare
I lost too much in no time.
Photosynthesis
Reboot the world in a tangle
of midnight, ripped
obsidian glowing enough
darkness for the body
of a cell to spread
its feeble strength on stone.
The curvaceous hips
of its endoplasmic reticulum,
Golgi industry and identity
as spinster
in a strand of RNA. Not feeling
the desire to divide
only to feed on rations
of minerals and pastel light.
After a sprint
of two billion years, it withdrew
from hydrothermal vents
of bitter heat.
It rose in serenades
of sun to oxygenate poise in green
shoots of grass and white fields the puppy breaks
freshly packed snow.
*****
Photography Credit: The author
Grace Lynn is an emerging queer painter who lives with a chronic illness. Her work, forthcoming in JAMA, Sky Island, Thimble Lit and Sheila-Na-Gig, 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 exploring absurd angles of art history.
