EMMA BOLDEN
Elegy
for GS
Someone put an end
to all these weathers. Someone hold
a mirror up against these rains.
Every grief I carry is a reflecting
pool surfaced, slit jagged
by the stone asking is this
a metaphor, is every metaphor
an action or cliché. Once a little love
knew me so I lived in open doors.
Someone take these hinges
as excuses aimed at keys. I keep
saying better & I keep
hearing bitter, is this action
a metaphor or a cliché.
You were saying. & I lived inside that open
dooring myself
against the possibility of
your saying as an action that ends.
You were. Saying every agony
is a beauty, the cards
give me their sympathy,
which is a way of saying how
I should feel. I should
feel. Another morning is
another year is another
collection of papercuts & spare
buttons. When I lived with you I lived
against the possibility
that all living is a door that opens
into a nothing & forever
a pale little Friday
tied up within its bands of rain.
Revelation/After
augury & ether / under the eternal
sky dialed quiet / after summer ruined its own dress
with rainspill & God / portioned out to his paupers
the paper skinning their trees / after the infant who
learned how to kneel before walking / before cherry
said its reds to the fields / was sky a direction or a
warning / were there nests beneath the great claws
of a system / we identified as beast bent by cloudface
the bracken insistence / of a season putting itself to
shame & then to bed too / early for the worms to
become dinner to be / beaked a hawk with an August
caught in its throat / throttled & hungered & anger
the bread the village laid out for its poor / the bad
blood- / smithing the temple in which every familiar
morphed into feather / the only kind / of motion
allowed is being / which is breaking which / is
restless as all living is / pointed towards its agonies
its endings like agate stoned heavy / in the mouth
a word / the hare scalped before the first full rumor
of plague / this the forbidden this / the thunder
we asked for without the rain / we needed but did
not ask for / a god understands the needs / of a god
aren’t the needs of a man or / the fields & their
fallows an endless flock / of factories & Wednesdays
we call upon God / as the father the thunder / beg
in every solemn pronunciation / the process of living
is the process of fading / on the edge of / apocalypse
where every bone makes its human / makes its home.
Cloture/October 2018
I take pills to control the way my body controls sugar
and then eat ice cream for supper. Peppermint stick. I
don’t care. Why should I care? If you have taught me
anything America it is that I am not to be cared
about. To be cared for. Why shouldn’t I agree. Why
shouldn’t I capitulate when the fire you built burns
from inside of this body. The television prophesies
that the body of this country will burn itself left to
right and right to left, the television is the flint and the
torch and the hand that burns the body of its self, left
to right and right to left. When he couldn’t come he
said it’s you it’s your fault it’s you and he wasn’t
talking to his fifth Jack on ice but by the seventh he
decided blame was as good as a blow job it’s you
there’s something wrong with you. Outside a woman
was crying. I could not determine if that woman was
me. Outside a woman is always outside. If a
government is representation of the people by the
people, then a woman has no government. A black
human has no government. A brown human a queer
human has no government. Outside a woman scales
the scales of liberty. She flags her fist in the air.
Outside a woman says what did he do grope her, so
groping is illegal now, give me a break. Outside a
woman is being groped. She did not give her consent
and she is not given a break. When he said if you
aren’t going to fuck me why am I even here I cried in
the bathroom with the faucet then cold-watered the
pink from my cheeks. Outside a woman stands in
a blue suit raises one hand recites testifies to the truth
one hundred percent and afterwards my America
every one of us your women walked white-lipped into
the hells we had been keeping so perfectly inside.
Indelible in the hippocampus. The uproarious
laughter. A country of white men who’d blade open
blue veins to prove the blood inside beat red. In the
drum of a heart beating down the lack that is night
how fast a woman’s mind shaves down a phrase,
turns his fault into hers. The uproarious laughter
indelible on the hips of a country that bends at the
waist, screams the mirror, holds the slick of a blade
against the beat of blood in her throat. A senator
reads to an empty room, the camera eyed wide as a
country Kavanaugh is a good man he’s a good man
but in my conscience I could not conclude. This happened. I
was twelve. I was five. I was fifteen sixteen twenty-
four eight and a half, I was almost to my car the keys
teeth between fingers I was wearing a pinafore an
overcoat leather pants nothing a suit I was almost to
the car to the sunset to the hospital to tell him to fuck
off and take his Budweiser with him. I was almost but
not yet ready almost but not yet home almost dressed
almost seventeen. I was taught to say I wasn’t raped
so it’s okay I don’t remember wasn’t I why would I
say it otherwise. A woman is always outside. A
senator speaks I hope that we have all learned something,
that we owe it to the victims. The camera eyed. The
room’s emptiness indelible as this country is its own
knife.
Emma Bolden is the author of three full-length collections of poetry—House Is An Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press) and Maleficae (GenPop Books)—and four chapbooks. She received a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A Barthelme Prize and Spoon River Poetry Review Editor’s Prize winner, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Best Small Fictions, and Poetry Daily as well as such journals as the Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, Conduit, the Indiana Review, Shenandoah, the Greensboro Review, Feminist Studies, Monkeybicycle, The Pinch, and Guernica. She currently serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Quarterly.
