Grace Lynn
Grace Lynn is an emerging queer painter who lives with a chronic illness and is working on her first collection of poetry. Her work 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.
Womb Made of Wind
In tosses of wind, thrown waters wash
ashore in a jaundice-pink dawn
after midnights of rain. Droplets fall
down my swimsuit to my femurs stiff
as pebbles. I play on the sandy edges
of knowing their meaning. Sea breeze fogs
my goggles smudging the crests
into a mountain of mouths foaming
at the sky. I pinch the soft earth
between the hinges of my toes
as a gale whisks my hair out
of its braid, blonde crossing
in front of my face. I shut my eyes
to become a funnel
of pure feeling: gulls squawking, water rushing
to evacuate and fill in the space between
my feet, raw minerals filming
the tip of my nose, streaks of sun baking
my forehead. I am inside
the consequences of growing up and old.
Fifteen and desperate to walk both ways
in a single step. To be ten fierce fingers wrapping
my mother’s thigh at a low tide. To individuate
a few paces away from her watch into someone
I do not yet know. When do we come to know
what the tender spine of us was made to be?
Stumbling on the shoreline, I grip my mother’s hand
holding a bucket’s handle. I dip my body
into the shallows to scoop up a starfish
and backbones of shell fragments. I let myself
drop with the rain into the lace-white waves.
What loss to make a problem out of living
or out of dying, solving for whatever we happen
to call whole. A goldfinch’s belly makes
a little noise. I tilt my head back
against the solidity of my mother’s sternum
and inhale for a moment
of eternity to saturate my lungs in the sweetest silence
I’ve ever known.
Pressing my hip into my mother,
I want to feast on our share
of not knowing what or why we are,
only that we were one body that suddenly cleaved
itself into two. On this shore, we become one
for a brief once more.
I follow the finches’ yellow-ochre soar
like a dozen dandelions on fire.
