Up & in an Easter mood she
cast her cares upon a circle
of plastic chairs, lawned &
sunned the color of milk
blisters. Where baby’s gone
all’s gone to fever, heavy
as a nightgown, nightshade,
flannel fallen down until
her legs don’t feel themselves
for fur. Poor missed beauty
of the Bama pageant. Poor
lips prickled up & pruned. Baby
food. When her body went
to milk her marriage went
to ceremony, bedside glasses
watered down to losses like
Moses rushing the weeds, like
every August is a goddamn afront
to the Frigidaire’s decency.
If she could remember
the color of water pooled up light
between her legs when she dreamed
of being a bikini, stringed
& beaned green as the color of money
is the color of the myth banded up
in the day a banker bought her
just to tie his Monday ties.
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 Pinch, and Guernica. She currently serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Quarterly.