Emma Bolden

Before the Hysterectomy

All that summer I lived with my heart
as a threat, with larkspur stuck in the greens
and the sky teething stars above. They were 

trying to tell me. They were really something.
And how was I supposed to hear over all that
purple in my throat? How was I supposed to 

know? That a light that looks so much like
a lingering could become a door that shuts
and locks itself. Even the gnats were embarrassed 

by the way I plucked every precious hunger. How
willing I was to call each one a promise. How
I wanted to believe that anything could be my own.

________________________________________________________________________________________

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, 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.