Redshift
Emma Bolden
Redshift
O far bright, o last
long, o longing
was the window through which I
watched the world
ode its wants, a hum I could
never fit in my throat.
Inside myself absence lived
as the presence of need: more
beauty, more egg shell
cracked open to reveal
its hidden sun, more
the morning dressed
in drawn drapes &
the grass tonguing green
a gray stripe of sky &
the incessant wonder of
a body shifting through
its words & what I know
already: there is a whole in me,
an empty I love as the only
thing I & alone own.
Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis (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, 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.