Emma Bolden

Nights in White Satin

was the song I always wanted to lose
my virginity to, as if virginity were a real 

thing to lose or gain. I had the song in mind
but not the place or person, not the prelude 

or postlude, not champagne or lobster or
credit card steak, not red dress red bra red 

panties singing from the chair, just the Moody
Blues & the violins lifting a voice higher & 

higher into I love you, yes, I love you, oh how
I would have loved for it to have felt like that, 

like a song that lifts you from your knees. Instead
I was in sweatpants before the bad speakers 

& the boy who said I was beautiful but in a weird way
before the awkward transition to cheap sheets 

& lamplight. Instead it was the arm & the hand
& the wet hair, the sweat dropping from his nose 

onto my forehead & the terrible afterwards in his arms
searching my memory for beauty I must have missed, 

searching for the reason I wanted this to be
beautiful, to be anything like a song 

I loved or understood.

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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.