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Against Metaphor
EMMA BOLDEN
Enough about the red bird. Let it
keep its beak, I say to the me
who just won’t shut up, won’t stop
turning grass to sea and sea to the inside
of a glass. Nothing makes sense when I’m done
with it, if I am ever done with it. You see
where the terror comes in, an edge
raw as bleeding. All I want is to hold
the world, the whole of it, on my tongue.
To taste the everything I have been given,
the everything I’ve been denied, too,
a sweetness heavy as honey swallowed
in the same way a hope is, as a medicine,
as a prayer to heal the throat
ripped red open, every word a feathered burn.
Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis and the poetry collections House Is An Enigma, medi(t)ations and Maleficae. The recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, her work has appeared in such journals as the Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, the Seneca Review, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, Ploughshares, and The Massachusetts Review. She currently serves as an editor of Screen Door Review.
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