4 Poems by Emma Bolden

DANCE OF THE CYGNETS

I wished roses, evidence and orchards, a mother

shawled and living, love painted wide as a moon-

nighted backdrop and land, dry land, the grass

that waved there a tremble to echo my tremble.

On the lake’s shore the girls swanned, arms emptied

of arrogance, toes tortured into the point of

someone else’s desire. I was a princess silvered

to my crown. I was blooded and bedded and I learned

that to be beauty is to be empty, to sharp the body, steady

the limbs unlikely as stems, as the legs of a swan

songed into being by a magician’s treacled tongue.

After a while fear feels like forgetting and forgetting

like a feather plucked, gently floating into its fall.

Each bladed calamus scrawled against my skin

a flurry of exhortations circled red, targets for the hunter

and his crossbow, which is always the point of the story.

We fall and we wish for a lake large enough to ether us,

me and my soft sisters, into the ancient sweetness of sleep.

HAG

I think I love the thud of me, a clump

of talons in the courtyard, a sequence

of rosebushes stripped beyond the restless

brag of bloom. I bare my teeth long like

I once bore the boredom of every forced

smile over sandwiches. There drop

my manners, feathers fallen from a high

flock. I think I am enough, finally, hanging

my face in the mirror’s center. Hag, I say

to the woman there. Hag, the woman

there says back to me. I slide into her grin.

There’s something mean to the cut of her

mouth that comforts me. When the night

wings in tremendous I feel the most

awake; I feel the most alive in the softening

center of me, the sweetest anticipation of

collapse, of a mess I’ve lived towards happily.

I blanket the landscape until I’m the only

thing I can see. Winter, that lovely, lent me

its waistcoat, an embroidered fringe of ice,

the only good feeling being freeze. Even

the smallest vengeance could fix me,

the most gruesome kindness cut me free.

EACH BARB IS A FEATHER WITHIN A FEATHER

-- Kate St. John

Rain high-hats the roof, which is & is not

also the ceiling. I worry about everything,

the parenthesis of the word, a liar, how it claims

to keep an all inside when there is so much

outside of it. Sometimes I dream & become

a bird & my beak has so much to say about sky,

that blue nothing. Sometimes I am not dreaming.

I crash my body against the gate of my bed.

In the garden, the gardenias grow gorgeous

because they are not mine, & neither is the rain

coming down in streams of silvered hair. I want to

laugh like I always do but some key locks

my jaw in the shut position & anyway what is

a laugh but a parenthesis that locks a misery

outside or inside of it. It goes on, the stuttering

rhythm of heartbeat & breath & I swear to you, I can

feel each sharp feather taking root, I can feel

what it means to leave a world behind by wing.

DISCOUNT SHOPPING THROUGH THE APOCALYPSE

All of us women in T.J. Maxx are sweating. We talk

ice packs, plant estrogens, black cohosh, the shots

that will lead us to love our bodies by losing most

of our bodies, the internet says. The hangers slip off

their clothes. It is not summer. The radio proclaims

a high of 90°. I’m looking more than ever at the mirror,

which looks back at me more like my mother than ever.

Eat your vegetables, the mirror says. Hold your shoulders up.

Why do you never mop. I glow a rage so incandescent

it’s indistinguishable from the sun, which the internet

wishes would just go ahead and explode. A friend sends

an article about an asteroid that may or may not be

aimed to end the earth. Destroy me, daddy, my friend

writes. Three emojis eject their tongues from pink

half-moon mouths. I refuse to walk down the pinkest aisles.

This isn’t the time for pale, I say. This isn’t the time

for longing or low-slung pants, for pretending

the eyes are windows for anything other than reflected

light. All of us women in T.J. Maxx dwell in bodies

that have fewer rights than the day they were born.

I wish my teeth would grow into knives, my nails

into actual nails. At a frequency too high for human

ears, each woman’s body emits a constant wave

of sound. Like a siren. Like a howl.

Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage (Soft Skull), and the poetry collections House Is an Enigma, medi(t)ations, and Maleficae. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she is an editor of Screen Door Review: Literary Voices of the Queer South.