Read More: A brief interview with Emma Bolden
A Gun is A Gun is A
freeze circling the circle that napes her neck where once she felt
the steel of his lips is the steel & the lips is the red laser walking a target up each step of the spine
on the back of a boy because the skin on his bones is brown is the body as its bones
hovered up & walked through air is the bloom we use as a metaphor to excuse
the bruise is a shock of purple is the broke blood vesseling through the body
the idea that forgiveness is compulsion is forgiveness as command is the child
dead is the child dead is the song of my country anything but the song of a mother
calming her child before firing is it precious in the eyes of the lord the death of his
beloved? is a zero righteous between two eyes is nothing like a hammer or a nail
is a machine made to hasten the production of corpses is a machine made to drain
the name from the body is a machine made to make a body into a number then multiply
by exponent is the mouth of a god the shooter created to bullet himself into god
is a blue shaking fifty stars loose is anger & incisor is wolfbane is hemlock is sewing a voice
to the void is a sentence unworded is a needle ticking the distance between blacktop and coffin
is a pine forest felled to build boats to ship our babies down is
poison as passage is a pennyless eyelid is a pupil watching the river widen
into an unwished eternity is foot severed from step is child- severed from -like
is the flag shaking off its stripes is the boy’s mouth made into absence a country
unnamed by its silence not its rage
The Prodigal Daughter
We knew she’d become a stranger by the hints in her perfumes.
Neroli’d, irised, she streetwalked a rumor through the market,
wrong-noted, strung out by the braid spining down her storied back.
Bought nothing. Sold for nothing. When pinked and little we warned
the child she was that beauty dangers, that desire when verbed
diagrams a sentence unto death. What could she teach our daughters
but to flee? Even the moon determined to silver her and so we refused
ourselves every wish to look. We wanted her whittled down to whistle.
We honeyed her body, threw it afield and prayed she’d be wolved
clean as any cry against mercy, mistaken as a god. Ink-scrolled her name
across stained linen. Sack-clothed her parents and with them stoned the river.
Told our daughters the bridge fired up into ash. Told our girls the far shore […]
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American Eschatology
After we lost our sun, the birds broadcast
their rumors, rough as a sky. We were never satisfied
with what the bottom of our boats said
we owned. Beside us rowed the white mess
we called winter. We called home to say
the fish grew teeth and ate the wires […]
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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 Journal, The Pinch, and Guernica. She currently serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Quarterly.
Read More: A brief interview with Emma Bolden