Emma Bolden

2 poems

The Exiled Speaks


Wind-caught, throat a burn, I & my longing
for water, a body of it, if the woman floats
she is a witch & if the woman sinks she is

dead. Well. Wandering never did anyone ill
except those with minds that couldn’t. Locked
into the land, the granary, the gravity of plate

to table, sun to season. It’s impossible to know
you live in a world that turns as long as you
tread the same circles. Tossed from village

& orbit I walked my winters & unto the valley
& even under threat of frost I feared nothing.
So much as survival spoke through the fox’s

femur, snapped. Better to die before the body
tells you every one of its bones. & anyway
the difference between the sainted & damned

is an eye that belongs to someone else. I gave
my attention to woodsmoke tying its threads
together through the trees, no empty, no beast

breath, no clawed nothing a threat redder than
the soft hands of those who sent me out to other.
I tell you, if there is in existence a god it lives not

in the lines of our human hands but in the forest’s dense
circuitry, branch & tooth, pupil as wide as the night
it lets in, the growl that sings hunger, an impulse

purer than those pious words, those pious lips
closed cold around their prey.

 

GIRLBLOODED


say something          caught in the throat
in the milled wind           in the nothing

house we live           linked from blood
to blood to blood           inside every

ancient augury          lives a woman
who is not woman          any or more

& where          does it cut her, bare
the blade that          hope is, where

does it purple         her bone-down
& deep          a sickness extravagant

as every other          she sweeps the rushes
& throws out the broom          & the night

is a terror         whether her mouth admit 
confession, a tangle, a fist          of dark

feathers, why          the alone harp, why
these notes rising          has spring decided

already it’s sick of it         this frenzied trash
of flowers, a fever          made of every

motion drawn          so carefully under
this careful roof          does she ever stoop

to wonder          if she kept the viciousness
it’s the point of a tooth          how through it

the body howls nightly          a darkscape
a dream of being          a mouth being

a tongue unspeakable           ringing copper
as the taste of blood          with which every

she is familiar          down to the nailed
half-moon of it          down to the evidence

no soap could scrub free          tethered
sister to sister          a moon beast a wild

bride giving her body           to the grass
to the ghosts          who’ll never stop

following their emptiness          aching, the sharp
harmony          of every tree’s needle raised

as a fist those outside           a her hope to raze

 

Emma Bolden is the author of three full-length collections of poetry -- House Is An Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2018), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press, 2016) and Maleficae (GenPop Books, 2013) – and four chapbooks. The recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best American Poetry, The Best Small Fictions, and such journals as the Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, the Indiana Review, Shenandoah, and the Greensboro Review. She currently serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly and an Editor of Screen Door Review. Her memoir, The Tiger and the Cage, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in 2022.