Downburst
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The day was its own warning. I was thinking of his head
on a plate in my lap. I was thinking of its soft loops of curls, fine as the hair punched into plastic doll skulls. I felt strange & electric & so did the sky, & when I looked out of the window, it looked back with green. There were clouds & clouds’ low stomachs lined silver. & there was a room in which I stood alone. When the squall line quickened, the room became aching. The room became wool. No god was there. |
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A Breviary
Instead of saying early the morning strung
its beaded condensation over the clarity
of glass where all of the morning a cat’s tongue,
barbed and thirsty, licked a way towards cool.
The window couldn’t tell and so it showed: a flock
of leaves, azaleas, asphalt, and what could the woman
who tried to look out do but listen, inside an evening
angled under a sun flushed as any need to leave. The window
repeated, reversed, her own face, holy as blue. What
could she do but hear a thousand petalled words for faith
in nothing less than the self that counts all morning
along with every burn and beauty.
its beaded condensation over the clarity
of glass where all of the morning a cat’s tongue,
barbed and thirsty, licked a way towards cool.
The window couldn’t tell and so it showed: a flock
of leaves, azaleas, asphalt, and what could the woman
who tried to look out do but listen, inside an evening
angled under a sun flushed as any need to leave. The window
repeated, reversed, her own face, holy as blue. What
could she do but hear a thousand petalled words for faith
in nothing less than the self that counts all morning
along with every burn and beauty.
Emma Bolden is the author of medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press) and Maleficae (GenPop Books). A Barthelme Prize and Spoon River Poetry Review Editor’s Prize winner, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Best American Poetry, The Best Small Fictions, Gulf Coast, StoryQuarterly, The Pinch, Prairie Schooner, Conduit, and Copper Nickel. She received a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and serves as a Senior Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly.
S. Billie Mandle is a photographer whose work looks at subjectivity and the built environment. Some of her recent projects have explored church confessionals, Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, and convent walls. She received her B.A. in biology from Williams College and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She is the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship, an Individual Artist Grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council, and an Artist Fellowship in Photography from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her photographs have been featured in Aperture and Cabinet, among others, and her work was nominated for the Prix Pictet and the Paul Huf award. She is an assistant professor at Hampshire College and lives in Western Massachusetts.
