Beatitudes

Blesséd be the first loves over ochre crayons, the girl who tried

to hide the fact she’d placed forest green in her mouth and chewed,

the first time light took her greened tongue and gave it beauty

in my memory, the first time weed felt like an early tree greening and

my mouth and I wanted to fell every self I had been

before I understood the primary language is silence. Blesséd

be the silence. Blesséd be the quiet nightmares, like the dream when I woke

up in the passenger seat to see my mother wasn’t driving the car, no

one was, and my feet couldn’t even reach the pedals. And blesséd

be my mother, loosing my childhood hair from the bristles’ grip

before leaving the brush to soak clean in sinkwater

foamed with shampoo, and blesséd be my father, blesséd too

the pacemaker pumping my father’s heart. Blesséd be

the heart itself, the symbol of the heart, the red construction paper

suffering the touch of a child’s safety scissors

on its way to becoming a myth, which is a word

we made for the words we use to make ourselves believe

the world is a thing we can sentence into our own understanding.

And blesséd be the thousand understandings passed

by glance between girl and girl in a bar: you are not safe

with any him, never unwatch your drink, walk with your key

between your fingers, I do not know you but in the bathroom

I will hold back your hair if need be. Blesséd be the girls

the girls the girls singing oldies at the stoplight, braiding

their voices into the ribbon that reaches out

their cracked windows, a standard, a bright flag

to say in this moment I am still

singing, in this moment I am still afraid.

Emma Bolden is the author of House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press), and Maleficae (GenPop Books). The recipient of a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2019 Literary Arts Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best American Poetry, The Best Small Fictions, and such journals as the Mississippi Review, The Seneca Review, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, and the Greensboro Review. She currently serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly and an Editor of Screen Door Review.