My Muse is Growing Up
My muse wears prescription glasses,
so she’ll never see
beyond the village
with its walled-in acres
of poolside loungers.
Plus, she quit her diet,
so her diaphragm gags her
esophagus and larynx.
I’ll find another voice
preparing to leave somewhere.
Starlings nest in her wool mouth,
under her tongue knots of familiar
as the juniper bush
bends her fingers to catch the night.
I call this girl my neighborhood.
Fingers like ten puny,
black summers waiting in the sky.
She skips into the juniper bush,
to where a rainbow saddles the alps.
She walks further into the horizon,
fall in the air and rain on its way
and who knows, like her,
the different smells of the grownups’ homes
preparing to bake butterscotch cookies
or braid the sabbath dough.
I call this girl my neighborhood.
Her walkie talkie is morosely
static in the tropical twilight.
She releases me from social media.
She holds onto the darkness,
believes like wildfire
in frizzy-hair-like echoes.
If she wades deeper, silences of darkness become
windows into waves,
and she and only she can see
the reclusive moon of doom imprinted
with ragtag teeth coughed up by the dog.
I’ll have to get her training bras and tampons.
I’ll still call this girl my neighborhood.
Warn her to put her guard up,
so she can make it to
the suburb stars of love
before we bury our body of time.
Grace Lynn
Grace Lynn is an emerging painter who lives with a chronic illness. 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 investigating absurd angles of art history.
