Poshmark
How nearly can I
inhabit someone
else’s body? I don’t
have any money.
Prostrate, scrolling
through other people’s
clothes, I’m wearing
the tearable pink dress
I met you in. It came
taped up in a box
that smelled like house
and once held water filters.
These truncated mannequins
I imagine angels appear as—
headless torsos, voices
emanating from necks—
scare me like you did.
Still I let divine will
fill me like a windsock,
commencing a delirious
motion. Now my love is a line
pulled by no current.
Thanks for your purchase!
wrote the woman in Queens
on scalloped cardstock.
Pulling her dress over
my head, light sieved
through sheer silk
and I saw the threads
binding my delight.
Copyright © 2025 by Erin Marie Lynch. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 12, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I think about clothes a lot, and I think about love a lot. What I don’t have, what others have, and what I want. Women be shopping … [but] we’re despised for the expression of desire that is required of us, that constrains us. I despise myself for it. Shopping wastes time; so does looking for love. It all costs. Novelty yields only brief pleasure. Raised Calvinist, I surreptitiously continue to believe that something irresistible will compel me. Still, online resale marketplaces—glutted, corporatized, alienating—can be surprisingly intimate. We ship beautiful things to each other, and they arrive smelling like us.”
—Erin Marie Lynch
Erin Marie Lynch
Erin Marie Lynch is a direct descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe (Ihánktoŋwan Dakota) and the author of Removal Acts (Graywolf Press, 2023). Lynch is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po), and Hugo House. A presidential postdoctoral fellow in creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, she lives in Los Angeles on Gabrieliño Tongva land.