Emma Bolden - Three Poems

The Path of Needles

I lay down in bed a little damsel and woke a grandmother.

In between: the damp flash of a life I could not wish for

or remember. My body soured, a stone fruit sucked clean

to the pit. I liked the bright taste of it. I liked the knowing

of it, that a pit is not a nothing but a seed. I sewed myself

into the sheets and then I rose, the story’s ghost. When

the wolf yawned, I plucked his teeth and with them devoured

the rest of him, furred and whole. Then I had acknowledged

hunger. I was not ashamed. I heard at last with my pointed ears

a thousand flowers ringing the forest. Overhead the moon

wasn’t like anything other than the moon. I had become

my ending, the one thing I’d be allowed to keep.

I-16 W

With unrepentant elegance a bird shat on the windshield

of the car I drove away from the last man I tried to love.

I wasn’t sad or sorry, I just wished I had a better view.

Unlike what I’d imagined there were no final frost-lipped

roses, no doves gently breaking out of their shells.

I couldn’t tell you what the man said, just that

a nothing curled itself in both his palms and I knew.

That’s what love offers. The bird didn’t even look

at me, just winged its feathers away. I didn’t mind

the highway, the incalculability of distance between

myself and the woman I’d been in his doorway,

hung by her coat. The trees blurred into song

and I sang along, all the way down to the far roots

of me, to my own good feet, driving on and on.

Self-Preservation

How could anyone enjoy this, I ask myself and often.

I want to be a swamp just once before I die,

frog-heavy, sonorous, letting all the saw-jawed

insects chew the last leaves from my rot.

Why shouldn’t I lay down a little while, rest

myself and let the mud preserve me? It’s only right

to refuse to be a void for anyone else to scream into.

I say I want a bog to lie down in but really I want a bed

unbothered by the concept of princess or pea. I want

to wake alone, triumphant. I want the best bed hair

of my goddamn life. I want to be as unhinged

as the serpent’s jaw. I want to swallow everything.

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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. Her fourth poetry collection, God Elegy, is forthcoming from BOA Editions. Her work has appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, the New England Review, The Seneca Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and Shenandoah. She is an editor of Screen Door Review.