Two Poems by Erika Luckert

Woman in the Sun, 1961

after Edward Hopper

When I stand naked
in the middle of the only room
that’s mine, my skin
is not the color of the light,
I am not framed by window,
bed, a beam of sun that’s just
my width and height,
when I stand naked
in the middle of the floor
I count the walls around me,
floorboards gleaming, bed
unmade, I do not hold
a cigarette and I am not
your wife. I write,
“if there can only be room
for one of us,” posed here
in the late October cold,
while women pass outside
in borrowed furs, my pores
protrude, each hair
extends, my skin
contracting underneath
your eyes is the only
room that’s mine.

On Finding a Sculpture of a Woman That Was Made by a Woman Too

after Harriet Whitney Frishmuth

Hers is not a pose
but a peak—her head
thrown back, her sternum
thrust toward the sky.
If this body is bronze
then she was carved,
still alive, with a scalpel,
her clusters of muscles
not cast in alloy, but
released into molten
ribbons, slit open into
an elastic joy.
So many times I’ve stood
beside her wanting
to put my hand
on her euphoric form,
the way a maître de ballet
touches the shoulder blades
the crests of the hip
the way we study
a person’s positionings,
imagine their organs, tense
their muscles, sense
their strains and tremblings—
I desire not her beauty
but her body—I crave
this anatomical abandon
that travels through elated
tendons, from achilles
to the hamstrings, coursing
unencumbered to the throat.

Erika Luckert is a poet, writer, and educator. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, CALYX, Tampa Review, F(r)iction, Atticus Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA in Poetry, Erika has taught creative and critical writing at public schools and colleges across New York City. In 2017, she was awarded the 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize. Originally from Edmonton, Canada, Erika is currently a PhD student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.