At the End of the Day’s Just a Night
Emma Bolden
except dying, which is why we have built
such grand houses for it, such hospitals
& cathedrals, such marble monuments
scarred with human faces. In none
of them are we comfortable. No matter
the incense, the Clorox, no matter
the requisite awe of a beauty
chipped out by human hands, no
matter the candles waving their little
orange flags of flame, it is awkward.
God gives us the silent treatment, & God
is a patience forever. Sometimes
at night I wake into this strange body
& ask it & the night where we’ve been.
Despite the insistence of poets, the stars
will never be an answer. Despite my own
insistence, a sky is just a sky. It is
awkward. To be a body laying prone
beneath a nothingness that speaks your name.
How a Body Lies
a dress as torn apart as a mother, trying not to
cancer the big house, the white fence thrilling a heart
with the keys knocking an ignition unlit
she occasionally took she started freaking
every marriage looked like an abandoned
car a bombshell of denial & the difficulties
of caution boy he was a beautiful
guitar’d & long haired all the distance
to Georgia she had never even seen him
all that time he tried to secret he broke
the war’s records did she even want
pay dirted into duct tape a pickaxe, a shovel
her body a bizarre discovery she began to vanish into
anyone else evidence suggests a desire sworn & taken
to the grave she failed to mention, she fell
missing, she fell out of the car into the roadway
under the narrative he built into the house & its halls
& its grays evidence suggests a trial, reports of her
guilt rising even as his hands shoveled out her grave
Constructed with language from 48 Hours Mystery: Body of Lies
Emma Bolden is the author of House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press), and Maleficae (GenPop Books). The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best American Poetry, and such journals as the Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, and the Greensboro Review. She currently serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly and as an editor for the Screen Door Review.