ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
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 fourth poetry collection, God Elegy, is forthcoming from BOA Editions. 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. An NEA Fellowship recipient, she is an editor of Screen Door Review.
Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry:
Ending Eden
Christmas, 2016
Arlington
In America We Have Only the Present Tense
In the Springtime of Her Voodoo
The television translates each bomb
to a point on a pattern like cross-stitch, like fourteen count, like
red five stitches high, like this way the news will just barely
prick us, a needle’s tip on some small padded point on the thumb, like
but what is the point if we don’t find a way for us all to get out
of this year alive? My telephone blinks, a bad eye, blackened to blue.
The president asks the government to make him more powerful and
the government agrees because they believe he has the power to make them
more powerful, make their enemies powerless, or because they believe
their God will come down anointed to earth and save them, also anointed.
Look, each crosshatch on the television’s map is a bomb, is a mouth
on a child’s heart, a mouth on a child’s map, a child’s stomach full
of teeth. Each bomb is a child devoured until there is no such thing
as children. The television puts the news on pause to sell me pills
and Diet Coke to swallow them, to sell me a world made available
at fine retailers nationwide for the low low price of $19.99. Inside of me
the needles are crossing, crossing, I feel all that threads me together, sore
and red. Each crosshatch on the map is a mouth in a child’s face
opening, trying to find a word for her last breath.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
