Karyna McGlynn

THE LAST TIME EMMETT MODELED NUDE

-from the Sally Mann photo, 1987 And suddenly I am entered by the warm jet of this boy I have raised, and I eddy about his hips, swirl hello against his braced thigh - you are here again, and I marvel at how his desire to stay on his feet like a man has mastered even the middle of me, hands well-versed in placation of movement - this small god son, suddenly halting the storm of time’s thrust where I pull back to see the body fully realized.

Karyna McGlynn

NIGHT BLOOMING CEREUS

-from the Sally Mann photo, 1988 In the moon time you have me rise to capture this image, important to both of us in different ways, the way the night curves everything for the hanging. My mouth, you say, is a long thin porch that reminds you of something, but only in the darkness that emaciates us both in its woolen moth rasp - This is the shifting from hand to hand - me, unfurling fingers of new pink flesh that shoot from your single dropped grain, you, watching life curl back in on itself each morning, as I appear in the dining room doorway in your big shirt, as silently, in your heat, you appraise the trade. Karyna McGlynn lives in Seattle. Her work has appeared in Agnieszka’s Dowry, Wild Violet Magazine, Branches Quarterly, Morpo Review and Unmade Magazine. Ms. McGlynn is a four-time member of the National Poetry Slam Team and the editor of Screaming Emerson Press. She attends the creative writing program at Seattle University and teaches performance poetry at the University of Washington Experimental College. Her newest collection is entitled The July Poems.

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