I palace the heart centered in my chest. No part
of my body tells the truth. Not a single brutal clot
of wisdom. Not the zero asleep in each bone.
Will I ever stop being so childish. Sometimes I sharpen
my lead and sometimes I watch as much television as I
want and it’s glorious, a shrimp’s eye of color. The subtitles
tell me what to hear, which I appreciate. There’s something
lost in the gray translation of air and anyway I’m just so over.
I’m just about this close to. There’s too much weather
in my body’s center. There’s no shelter to seek in the interior,
blank rooms, bald windows and etceteras, no way to shutter
the bud and the beauty, the dream of what I thought I was
going down smooth. I palace the heart because it can
bring the whole city down along with it, because I’ve never
known a verb more terrible, more gorgeous than to fall.
–
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. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she is an editor of Screen Door Review.