An Immortelle
Consider: the lilies stink. Death’s rich
as a vault that locks its jaws
to keep a fortune from the world. From the ground
that was the dead sprout flowered flags, a lost
love’s pixelated photos, paper carrying notes that require
tongue and breath for translation to song.
Listen. I’m the graveside girl trying to pretty up
a picture of my gone one’s forever, plucking
the strings that tie together roses, carnations,
pizzicato white, white. Later I’ll hate myself
for hanging six plundered blooms from the rack
in my laundry room. I’ll close its doors
so I can forget what I stole as the roses fade past
recognition. Isn’t that the way to make a little something
like a life out of days? A shudder, then a shuttering,
and then rename each debt as paid.
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: Literary Voices of the Queer South.