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.