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Emma Bolden

Confiteor

from NER 41.2
Buy the issue in print or as an ebook

Under the bloomed moon I forged & fortuned, I saw
all the forests as leaves, as the wind that broke between
& over & into. The force of nature as the force of beauty

sweet as a betrayal, the once which carries within
its own never & never its own more. I tried to voice
loud. Tried for star or startle. I tried to find a space

solid & grounded. A stone. A trunked tree. A place to hold
my feet to the fire I swore still burned inside. I bled
my time into borrowed, bested & night-wet & begging

the sky wide for any sweetness I could worship
into speaking like a god would, like a fire inside
unframing the body some body built as an else for me.

I walked, well-wooded & nightlit. I sought salvation
or at least explanation. Or at least an excuse for. The force
that runs these legs & the body they carry is never

an answer. The clearing opens into its existence as a clearing
only. Why am I unsated, so hungry with expectation?
Any word a god would speak is a word no human

could understand. I listen to the slick dark & its oceans,
its feathered furies, its glints that may be
eye, that may be teeth. I am not a thing like the world. & the way it whirls

its winds forward. It spurts in gnats & bark, folds its being
back into itself until its god tells it to begin, begin. I may be,
but I have no part of its sweetness. Its greenrise. Its again. Again.

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Vol. 42, No. 1

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Writer’s Notebook

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

Sarah Audsley

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

Writing this poem was not a commentary on a rivalry between the sister arts—poetry and painting—but more an experiment in the ekphrastic poetic mode.

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