The Sun As She Experiences It 
​by ​Emelie Griffin 

​In each of my favorite scenes
the actress undoes
her jewelry. She is preparing
for sex: The rings
twisted off and discarded
beside a bowl of fruit.
The necklace drips from a finger
to the floor. Now we are in the sun
as she experiences it,
our vision consumed by grass
and raw dirt, blots
of peeled, radiant sky.
Her stomach is a white stone
like the ones that caught moonlight
among black stones
in the streets of Pompeii
exposing a path to chariots
as they swept through at night.

At the bar I see a man
with long hair. I’d like for his hair
and my hair to mingle
in such a way that it becomes
impossible to tell our hair apart.
The men in Pompeii
would point to a sex act
painted above a doorway
and walk through that door
and sometimes it is as simple
as that. On a hike I lay myself
down on a slab of rock
and say, I am to be sacrificed.
Something about the slab of rock—   
how unadorned it is,
how it receives the sun’s heat
without any reticence,
no matter which animal. 

---

​Emelie Griffin lives in Texas, where she is a doctoral student at the University of Houston. She serves as Online Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast.

Read more...
Winter 2019
"Paradise" by Emelie Griffin

---