Emma Bolden

Girls’ Life

In eighth grade Algebra I sat between 
two doll-eyed girls who were always moving, 
feet tapping, knees dancing, shoulders rolling. 
They’d read in a magazine that a body 
in constant motion cannot hold 
its calories against the thigh like fat. 

Cleanliness is next to godliness but thinness 
is even closer, the magazines told them, told us, 
splayed open on the bedroom floor, their pages white 
and eerie and accurate as angels. As brutal 
as angels, too, in their example of a life 
rightly lived. A girl life, all lace and vetiver, straight

necklines, scooped hair, the slow frost of pale 
mauving each fingernail, an oval as perfect 
as any arc towards God. On every page the girls 
smiled like a good death, one that finds you
sleeping so your loved ones can call it peace. 
And once I’d seen them, what else could I do? 

My shoulders rolled and rolled, an echo restless
as the empty space between a gear’s teeth, 
the gear itself unstoppable, set into motion 
by a need that first belonged to someone else,
like we had belonged first to God then our mothers, 
like we were all one body working hard to disappear. 

---

Eigengrau

I patiented my history, bit my mouth 
to blood. I was a very good young. 
Stoppered up the complaints still hot. 
Shouldered my comportment with 
the openness of lace. Holied all 

my yearnings, tied a bracelet of 
because tight around both wrists. 
I waited for my becoming, a passage 
through which I might approach healed. 
I wished for empathy or elegy, forgot 

the concepts of wings and forgiveness, 
the field decking itself in yellow-jeweled 
gorse. The sky I remembered as a bright 
trash of rain, a wind sending the wrens 
screeching off with the worms in their beaks. 

There was a story someone told with ether. 
I tip-toed backwards from one hundred. 
Even my teeth turned numb. At night I lay 
long and felt limbless, listened for the hours 
whispering against my hair. I knew no freedom 

like both eyes closed, a gray intrinsic to the space 
I entered before the luck that was losing 
all thought of myself. And the night held me 
so dutifully. I was good enough to learn 
there was nothing I should want so much 

as the sweet gravity of sleep. When I closed 
my eyes, I swam a gray set of waters 
seeking the larger stream.

Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis (Soft Skull), and the poetry collections House Is an Enigma, medi(t)ations, and Maleficae. Her fourth 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. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she is an editor of Screen Door Review.