Two Poems by Erin Lynn
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SUNLIGHT IN WINTER
You stand in the bright lit room
and press your face against the glass.
Across the street is a cement factory
that grinds slaked lime, day and night.
It is day. The room is full of sunlight
but has none of its warmth because
it is January and you have moved from home
to live in a curtainless room, regarding
the grinding, bulblike machines in their
endless acts of production. In your hands:
nothing. And in your head is the steady
sound of the crusher milling raw rock,
making a pulp of it, and your own
thoughts, addressed to no one.
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SHARING A BOWL ON A MONDAY IN JUNE
From one EAL to another
It’s summer and we are sweating through
the afternoons without any coolant
aside from the window and the weed
we smoke enough of to appreciate
the salt water pearling off our suntanned skin.
Sipping seltzer, you propose we sell
our underwear—there’s a market, you say,
people would pay a lot just for the smell
of young women who like wearing lace.
We wouldn’t even need to construct
the narrative—age, sex, location enough
for fifty bucks and the pleasure of recycling.
The earth is heating at an increasing rate
and you and I are either too brilliant
or too slow to take regular jobs,
ones that would blunt the edge of this rush,
like we like it a little, this being hungry,
playing with ways to sell our sex
from a safe distance, invisible space.
Just blocks away, men move more money
around in seconds than we can imagine
in our lives, weighing the land’s fate
with what they might secure against it:
buildings so tall and thin they eclipse
the weather, and whether women like us
deserve to manage our futures.
Is sex worth the risk of becoming mother too soon?
In Arkansas, a new law requires rape victims
to inform their rapists before an abortion.
What portion of earth is there for those
who wish to sit beneath a tree, mesmerized
by wind in leaves, unambitious of the space
the sparrow takes up? You say
our generation shares everything because
we have to, and this is our virtue.
