Lena Crown

Going to Him

After Death and the Maiden, a painting by Egon Schiele

This is about the staunchly desperate space
between her knees on the white sheet 

draped lovingly across the boulders.
Pink serious mouth, bare brawny feet
and in the center of each cheek

a raspberry. The whole scene bends around her
firm surrender: the rocks, the moss, the oxen
in the burlap hills, patched with a little green.

I want to scrape the horror from the face
resting its chin against the crown of her soft head,

eyes painted open. Not all is wild.
Someone has made the earth say beans
and kale instead of grass, refusal, silence.

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Lena Crown's work has been published in Guernica, Poet Lore, The Rumpus, Joyland, Passages North, Gulf Coast, Narratively and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and grants from the Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, PEN/Faulkner and the Peter Bullough Foundation. She served as the 2023-24 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Nonfiction at Colgate University and she currently edits books for Autofocus, a small press. She also produces and hosts Awakeners, a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts.