I Tell Myself the Beloved Can Be the Self

and I try to believe it, too, the way I try to believe
in most things that are beautiful and therefore impossible

to have faith in, like believing the robin eggs will be
whole as sky beneath their overturned nest, like believing

the mother bird will always return as long as I don’t
touch her nestlings. I wing out both arms in the nest

of my bed. I feel every space like the freedom
that flight is: not without fear, not without the recognition

of a world disappearing, too far away to squint and see.
I tell myself I too deserve beauty, even if my tongue bitters

its taste. I tell myself to keep telling myself that if
living alone is a shell of a life, an egg takes that shape

because it’s the strongest, that I can be gentle enough
not to break what I, after all, give myself to carry.

by Emma Bolden


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. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she is an editor of Screen Door Review

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