Poetry from Emma Bolden

Photo: Clay LeConey

Joy

Honestly it’s awful. How it haloes every
tiny terrible thing with promise, even

the forsythia, dying, already dead, melting
to scum green, a sick yellow over the vase.

Gray would be better, a more accurate
approximation of the way joy balloons

up the sky: it isn’t the Mylar sack, bright as
an insect, but the storm cloud that shoves it

down a seagull’s hungry throat. Joy begins
as the heart ascending into an atmosphere

where it has to know its own ending
waits, sharp as a beak, as a piercing

that over time rends the tapestry
unreadable, every thread as frayed

as the voice that says when I met you,
you were summer, now I’m sick as shit of winter.

I think it would be better to stay
unwound, unwoven, wouldn’t it be

beautiful to be the rough stuff
of fiber just shorn, to never be

spun at all into the gorgeous
trash of beauty, which is always

and already obsessed with the idea
of fading, already the nothing every

bright something carries – does
it always? – in its core.
.

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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 work has appeared in such journals as the Gettysburg Review, the Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, Ploughshares, and the Greensboro Review. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she is an editor of Screen Door Review.