By Emma Bolden
/ Poetry /
the problem with daughters is they must also be people
& the problem with people is some must also be daughters
but here in this body I have lived only
as a loan from the earthrot to which I return
the interest of old men, sharp-toothed babies
for whom a breast is a breast is a breast a sign
of anything, a circle circling a target, & if you can arrow you are beloved,
there was a well once with fresh water, it was safe for women to drink down to the bottom,
it was safe for women to admit they knew
there was such a thing as thirst, a first sunset
spinning across the close of the first day
she woke able to stretch her body across the whole
of the bed where once a man taught her that
breaking is its own art. but remaking is too.
amid the soft ochres a woman remembers,
she was daughtered to this, one palm lined
with the lie that she’d be the same before &
after, one with the lie that her soul was her own