Karyna McGlynn

I like to yank necklaces from women’s throats.
I am unconcerned
whether I break the clasps or the women.
A spray of pearls in the sunlight. No comment.
I smoke in the same sunlight.
Unconcerned in my underwear on an old floral chair.
My feet on the armrest. Look at me.
Little sensual snail.
Feet on the dashboard. The same sunlight.
I am a passenger in his Wagoneer
racing to a lakeside house where I will die.
In a Coeur d’Alene diner our waitress is pretty
with big breasts and black eyes.
She deserves better than this.
When she goes out by the dumpster to smoke
we kidnap her. Look at me, I say. Look.
The same sunlight on the lake house.
Grilled meat smell licking the side of the lake.
The three of us in a boat.
I am feeding the waitress slices of apple
off the side of my knife. She is wearing
my old green bikini. The boat cuts through
the no wake zone. Spray of water in the sunlight.
The droplets cling to her glasses. She doesn’t
wipe them away. She wants to tell me something.
Look, I say. We all have an imperfect past.
We swim out to the untethered raft.
He is showing off. He dives down under
the cool shadow, hides between rusted barrels.
He looks through the gray planks
into our green and cherry crotches. Sunlight.
He puts algae in his hair. He gurgles.
Look, I say. Monster. A thing goes ping, ping, ping.
His mouth. Her ear. Someone makes a wineglass sing.
I lick my thumb. I won’t stop it.
One time a body washed up in a greening slip.
It was waxen with cold and axed down
everyone’s Indian summer. True story.
You should come kiss me for telling it.

Karyna McGlynn is the author of I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize from Sarabande Books. Her poems have appeared in Fence, Salt Hill, Columbia Poetry Review, Subtropics, Court Green, Ninth Letter and Denver Quarterly. Karyna received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and is currently pursuing her PhD in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston, where she is the Managing Editor of Gulf Coast. She curates the Houston Indie Book Fest and the Gulf Coast Reading Series.