by Emma Bolden
The television hunk looks a little
to the camera’s left. I’d never go back
to change things. Then I wouldn’t become
the person that I am, he says. What
a tub of shit, I say. He’s lying. Outside
the sun aims its gentle spears of light
at the blinds. I watch the feathers
operating in the capacity of flight
on the wings of the sparrow who’s spent
all spring shitting down my chimney.
What else. That’s just its nature, our nature,
and isn’t it natural to want to go back, to clip
the wings of your past self before
you flew up and rained down ruin?
Outside a man sweats in the sun
until his t-shirt shines wet. He’s clipping
his grass to three perfect inches, and down
in the cul de sac someone’s dog hollers
like he’s got something soft up a tree
and in his sights. I know how he feels,
I can feel the thrill spining through
me like the filth a fork must excise from
a shrimp’s curled pink in order to make it
edible. Palatable. The television hunk, of course,
goes back in time after all, and ruins things
before he rights them and comes back —
of course — to the very same life he’s learned
to love through living a different one.
He couldn’t help it, like me, like the dog and
the squirrel and the neighbor and his shirt. So
the story keeps going and we go on inside it,
telling ourselves that we’re the ones writing.
::
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.
Image: Ariel
ID: shadow of window blinds on a yellow wall by a red curtain.
Psaltery & Lyre 