Paradox

—It’s this darned corset. It binds.
No three-way stretch? How very unchic.
        Vertigo

She sketches lingerie as architecture:
suspense, a cantilever bridge,
 a fraught brassiere
plunge,
the trellis 
of a 
corset
wasp cinch,
medieval 
in that grand epoch 
of Merry Widows, girdles, and garters.

    let the moon go palely incidental, absent the sky 

Surprised not by a body 
unclothed
but by
the   
impressions 
the straps leave,
clasps and stays that redden flesh.

Some things we have only as long as they are lost
the paradox of timekeeping, the consequence 
of an absolute

    it’s dark in here

the image of her silhouette inside 
a moonbeam as she rushes
over cobblestone in

    a gown yellow veined throughout ruby on succulent sea foam

to follow the script, his wish
spun gold 
 a red 
pendant,
the
friction
of
reverse
desire,
a want in being.

 

Lynn Fitzgerald teaches poetry and literature for the Chicago City Colleges. Her most recent collection of poems is entitled Her Dress Does a Flip (dancinggirl press, 2025). Her first chapbook, Closer to the Earth, (Moon Journal Press, 2011) was awarded a CAAP Grant for artistic merit.