Where roses sunset the mountainside I was sore
and frayed the rope connecting me to this
world. It was not mine. I told myself to
locate the coordinates of pleasure, of a place
empty enough to be called a reprieve.
I believed in silence as a gateway to a greater
silence, to the infinite zero some called God.
There were all the bright lies the tulips
pushed through their lips. There was the threat
of bramble, thorn and vine incalculable
in their complexity. I could no longer ignore
the violence a sunrise did to the sky. The roots
called me impatient and I called them
unnecessary. It seemed an impossible corollary,
to link stillness and holiness, to seek anything
one could find by kneeling with two hands
pressed against each other like a door
pressed into its hinge. I told myself
there was nothing left to open but my mouth,
no space I could fill but my lungs. How
the screams flocked from my throat, winged
red across the sky. How the birds just
kept flying. Everything and I refused to turn.
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, 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: Literary Voices of the Queer South.
