Landscape with Written Statement

PoetryIssue 14
Written By Lynn Melnick

→ PUBLISHED IN ISSUE NO. 14: FALL/WINTER 2014

 

You wrap my ribs in gauze —

an experiment with the word tenderly


after your hands left my throat too bruised to speak.


While winter sun squints at the ghost flower

dying in its shabby terra cotta


far from home


men tell me to be honest about my role in the incident:


Okay, yes

I should have stayed inside


while you railed from the sidewalk


but my confused heart got into the car.


What happened is

I once spent too much time in the desert


so pogonip seems glamorous hung stuck in the trees

like when blood dries on skin


and I want to wear it


out for an evening,

pat my hands over its kinky path down my face


because: fuck you,


you didn’t find me here.

I brought you here.


Lynn Melnick
Lynn Melnick has had poetry appear in APR, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and A Public Space, and her essays have appeared in LA Review of Books, ESPN, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University and the 92Y and works with saferLIT.
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