Melancholy Between Bedsheets
We lay in bed with nothing to count but numbers
and so they kept getting larger. Night was a gossip
about every car. You were building a wall. It wasn’t
a dream. You were building a wall and when we woke
our eyes stayed shut. That’s how love works, you said,
and I said I guess. All morning love’s racket,
its hacksaw, its gossip and coffee. All morning love
wasn’t a dream. And when we woke our eyes
were sleeping. That’s how love works, so we lay
in bed counting. It wasn’t a dream. There wasn’t a sky.
Instructions (as to Winnowing)
Shut your mouth or else
spiders will march over
your tongue’s pink plank.
Throw out buckets of water.
Then throw out the buckets.
Then the sink. If you hold […]
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Emma Bolden is the author of Malificae (GenPop Books, 2013), and medi(t)ations, forthcoming from Noctuary Press. She is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry and one of nonfiction. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Conduit, the Indiana Review, the Greensboro Review, Feminist Studies, and Copper Nickel. She’s been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University.