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Áine Griffin is a junior at Endicott College, where she is studying English and Secondary Education. Griffin is from South Boston, Massachusetts, but a piece of her heart will always be with her family in Connemara, Ireland. When she is not writing, she loves painting, rowing, having long conversations with friends, and getting perpetually distracted. She has previously been published in the Endicott Review and has received the Derby medal for an English poem.

Imago Dei

Áine Griffin

As I float between who I am and who I am becoming,
sometimes I can’t help but get so dizzy, so groundless,
that I have to stop midday just to
swim in my uncertainty.

Sitting with the world in my throat
I close my eyes and go back to that familiar scene,
the little bench in the garden of roses and rectitude
where I can find my breath in the quiet pulse of creation.

When they open, I acknowledge I am not alone.
By a tree in the garden stands the man.
My heart jumps as I think of everything he is.
The strong arm and the warm hand and the young grin, 
the tender piece of flesh above the groin,
the bulging muscle of the thigh.

When he walks over to the bench
my cheeks flush with swirls of heat 
and I feel like I did when I was a young girl,
sitting on the edge of the schoolyard,
wide eyes and butterflies
watching the boy with the freckles and gapped teeth.

I’ve been waiting for you, I say, as he sits down on my right. 
He rests his head on my shoulder,
and I think of everything I would give up
just to hold him
in my heart
and in my home
and in between my teeth,
forever.

But then, more subtly, in walks the woman.
She isn’t as abrasive about it,
glowing in my periphery, her body bathes in sinking
hues of violet and blue,
I call to her: mum, sister, friend,
come join us in the shade!

But tasting my insincerity she just stands, wise and patient at the threshold.

Frightened, I try to cling to the man,
but the violet of the woman bleeds into my vision
and covers the edges of my throat;
I can’t breathe.

When I’m choking, gasping for air,
I let myself see it.
The soft meeting of her lips, the dip of her collar bone,
the curving fat of her waist.
There’s a magic that dances around her
and a fiery blaze behind her eyes
that takes the wind from my lungs
and shoots the pulse of new life through my veins.

She frightens me.
For I can love the man as an outsider, I can love every inch
of him for everything I am not,
but I know the woman too deeply.

I know her pleasure and I know her plight
I know her beauty in admiration
and know it in envy—

But despite these fears, I also know
when she sits on my other side
I feel miraculously myself,
a hand in Adam’s and a hand in Eve’s,
I am powerful and alive.

Before I can run back in cowardice
they lean in and kiss the tender flesh
of my neck— 
while I stare, steadfast and unbreaking,
into the eyes of God

and ask him if he likes his reflection.

— Áine Griffin

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