Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Karyna McGlynn

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.