Grace Lynn

October 2026 | poetry

Suddenly We

Disability, a tense steel umbilical cord plucking

its steady one note of need, coupling us outside

the palace of your uterus, in emergency rooms

where my wheelchair bullies clocks to rewind

until I am suddenly we, blind labor linking us;

me at thirty, you at seventy to portable bedside

commodes, to prescription regimes, our eyes

a synapse apart search the day for my seizing

limp right arm lost in a coat sleeve. I live wired

to a baby monitor between our beds, strumming

the singular note my helpless hand can no longer

play. I am still shrinking inside my stroke, caged

within our common carefree before, impossible

afternoons under Haifa almond blossoms, us two

divided even as we embraced, a buoyancy in swimming

pools, a cadenza of two notes in flea markets, in SoHo

alley cafes, elbows skipping past Degas at the Met or up

Rue Saint-Honoré. Two solitaires strung tight, then loose.

My legs heading to Cambridge while you imaged breast

cancer a few cities away. How unprepared we are, three

years or decades into the foreign zip code of umbilical

disability, our stomachs slammed against another shade

of night, your forehead creased with my pain, your blues

bloodshot with my hemorrhage, my body a missing half

of who I am meant to be, cleaved to a black childhood, to us

a mess of memory, penned in parentheses, our cut contiguous

tissue reissued. We pray and fall prey to poetry, our shared

lonely note hours pick along our dark, sacred umbilical cord.

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.