Pounding Pavement - Grace Lynn

Sprinting around the reservoir at dusk, scratching gravel 
as naturally as a rash, sprinting from nothing but panting 
like a maiden on a sweat voyage kicking up a stranger’s footprints 
in my wake past starlings and penned slopes of grass 
where dogs chase each other in velvet packs. A few miles more,
what I thought was a duck becomes a boat a boy navigates 
on the riverbank with his console. Scattering the blooming
pigeons down a sunny spray over tire depressions in the path, 
I run until I am hunched lungfuls of air, ready to let gravity
touch my toes and settle me into an animal: wind-washed hair, grime,
non-words rising. Now, breath breaking and catching, I keep turning
and crossing into sprawling fields, itching the air and perspiring
it out in patches where my shirt sticks in broken heartbeats
to my breast. Past peat bogs and pines, a smear of sky flung backwards, 
blinking where rusted iron slants into a bridge, stumbling 
into wildflowers, into a field flaxen as hay, my thighs going ahead 
without me, along with everything in my ribcage. What was harsh in my life:
demerits for overdue library books, eraser-ripped calculus pages.
And two months spent in an asylum of darkness, negotiating
our apartment hallways with my hands hooked into my mother’s hips
as my mind made an allergy out of light. The sun sets the sky indigo enough 
to realize this track is what faith once meant. How the road is black 
because wherever prayer ends, it begins with memory full 
of holes and the pale body coiling itself again into springs of fear 
and muscle at night.


Grace Lynn is an emerging queer painter who lives with a chronic illness. Her work, forthcoming in JAMA, Sky Island, Thimble Lit and Sheila-Na-Gig, explores the intersections between faith, the natural world, art and the body. In her spare time, Grace enjoys listening to Bob Dylan, reading suspense novels and exploring absurd angles of art history.