The Room Folded in Gelid Light
there was a wrought iron hole in my body
from my bed the retractor looked far away
I fingered the grillwork, the cool hard
lips of the thing someone said had teeth
might bite my finger, somebody said
don’t touch now, germs, in any case
mea culpa, what was I doing trapped
in a storm drain in the first place
somebody said I must be patient now
patient as patio furniture
it was out of my hands
there were eggs stuck in my iron mouth
my head swayed, an airy addendum
the soft shells pulsed like shrapnel
they were lodged in my coal hole
somebody said say you are only a house
I am only a house, good, now breathe
Karyna McGlynn was born and raised in Austin, TX and received her MFA from the University of Michigan. Her first book, I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, won the 2008 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry from Sarabande Books. She’s the author of three chapbooks: Scorpionica, Alabama Steve, and, forthcoming, Small Shrines. Her poems have recently appeared in Fence, Denver Quarterly, Diode, Octopus, Typo, Caketrain and Anti-. Karyna teaches at Concordia University and will be the Claridge Writer-in-Residence at Illinois College this fall. She edits L4: The Journal of the New American Epigram with Adam Theriault.