Today's poem is by Emma Bolden

Postdiluvian
       

A flinch of sky shattered into an iridescence.
A chill electric as a bad tooth shocked by ice.
Above: the color of marlin. We could neither
keep walking nor yield. & far past the fields

the beasts we'd called wild marched
to the forest's edge & stood, a collage
of star glint gumming up their teeth. Once
there'd been a story that grew a garden,

that orcharded, innocent, & we turned the tangles
of its vines into the snake we blamed for our
propensity to abandon our weakest to the leaves.
See we had lived for so long in gleam.

See in the distance the gray sound of a bird
without the gray bird. See we knew no longer
the difference between disaster and decency.
Above: the sky fluoresced & we were sore afraid

of how every circle we made became a wheel. We were
the ones, furred & unmercied, who stood outside
of the garden & learned the world we lost was not ours
to begin with. See. It was ourselves we feared so nakedly.

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Copyright © 2024 Emma Bolden All rights reserved
from Asheville Poetry Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission