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​In the Gray
by Emma Bolden


​​I was his weekend    his midnight his five    calls at five a.m. for five hours I was no       lover I was his    later his     ladder I was pared & parted I was his she’s creeping a round the wallpaper down the hall with the darkness sitting  on his chest his three a.m. I was highway his road beer I was waiting on the other    line while he waited at the liquor store    gas station    grocery six pack   hidden at the bottom of the bag did I think   she’d like his roses    did I think she’d live his lilies did I    know anything    to do about all of these graces these grooves into which suffering    settled like a swan songed over &   into an outing in every dream a field   greened I wanted liquor   lapped up like a cat  stealing your babies’ breath I was the woman who flew who broomed him I was the man who fished in his fly    I was the one    who didn’t want to    say    because his far body couldn’t    find a way to enter    mine because I didn’t want to keep    wanting I was a low    rung on his ladder but he held my head    down anyway   forced his man his hood his  words into my mouth every   pill & every needle every night stripped   down to its singular   & acute angles of    alone every moment I sang    & sweat & suffered in     the caving shelter of this bed-self was & is     only my own absolute fault    my sweet cyanide a capsule bed &   a bad radio    a voice made of wind & France shuttered in its grace    did I know this    pleasure was its own gun    all of my evenings heaved    & helloed loved into lust & clutch    climbed into bed & a body    I have a hunger an open throating       through midnight      for mercy         o lord        let me be          my own peace
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​Emma Bolden is the author of three full-length collections of poetry – House Is An Enigma (forthcoming from Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press, 2016) and Maleficae (GenPop Books, 2013) – and four chapbooks. The recipient of a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Best Small Fictions, and such journals as the Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, the Indiana Review, Shenandoah, the Greensboro Review, and The Journal. She currently serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly.


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June 2018

ISSN 2157-8079
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