Emma Bolden
poetry
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 fourth poetry collection, God Elegy, is forthcoming from BOA Editions. 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. She is an editor of Screen Door Review.
When I Say My Heart Is Full, I Mean It's Full of Ghosts
On the monitor flashes a creature that’s nothing like a heart.
The cardiologist says this is normal. I think there is nothing
normal about having inside of your body an animal that jumps
and stutters and stops beyond your will, wild even in grayscale
on the doctor’s monitor. Outside, the elms branch into branches
that bud with leaves; the trees collect their secrets in rings inside,
truths they’ll tell only after the axe kills them. I think sometimes
this is also true of the soul and the body and then I’m miserable,
imagining that at the moment of death I’ll reveal every humiliation
ringing its truth through my trunk. The cardiologist has no metaphors,
just advice: less caffeine. More water. More walking. On the screen
my heart is silent, still the floating ghost of a beast running weird
in black and white. Then I’m outside; the elm has dropped
the bright crescents of its leaves all over my car like a prophecy.
None of us get out of this world without losing, without something
of the self hitting the asphalt, hitting a high green note to howl out
the history of how it felt to vanish under a tire’s tread.
“
The title of this poem actually originated as a post I made on social media. Two friends suggested that I write a poem based on that post, and it’s so rare to get good and kind advice on the internet that I had no choice but to follow it. I realized that, during my last visit to the cardiologist, my heart did indeed look like a ghost, which became the central image haunting this poem.
”
