Coda
My mother’s best friend is dying, though no one will admit it. She calls about lost wallpaper, little holes loching the tufted chairs. There are holes everywhere. I admit them. Once she drove a needle thick into the thick of my hip. Once she told me the blood was not normal. There are both too many and not enough accurate words for unwell. My mother’s best friend says there are words in the trees but can’t tell us what they are. Everything’s a secret. Once she and my mother were girls with mouths that sang and sang. Until, of course, they didn’t. Once a needle always a needle and never again a thread, they say and don’t say. When I was a girl I opened my throat and read the notes someone left there. Then swallowed. My mother’s best friend lost every word she had, every chair she had, every familiar reckoning. There’s a sound the wind makes with the leaves. Listen, even the birds sometimes believe their trees are singing.
Watching/Warning
At an aggrieved angle the sun held its grudge against the lawn, I felt both dreaded & done for,
an augury slick-fisted, incapable of discerning a future through the fir-limned trees, do you
always have to be so dramatic my mother used to ask me, & because she was my mother I knew
I didn’t have to say yes, it was obvious as a halo tumbling from the head of a staked saint, the light
was sure something but the clouds were too arrogant to give up their bad tricks, the absurd profusion
of birdsong backdropping a bad feeling, the sky so greened & keening its clouds in a whirl, so much
like the mind always is. Like my mind always is. Every window a terror sliced from a world both
lit & unlit, daysick & nightbright, in the continuance of emergency I could no longer divine within myself
a spirit like awe or elation, a prickling reverence for danger, I could no longer think of the mind
as a lowering vortex or as a soul, something god- lit, star-heavy, sent through the center of all
space & time to slow & stop inside the simple setting of an ordinary body, I could no longer think
of anything approximate to the urge to save myself & so, simpled into a shape by lightning
flashing the doorframe, I stood & I stood. I refused.
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 Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, the New England Review, The Seneca Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and Shenandoah. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she is an editor of Screen Door Review: Literary Voices of the Queer South.