"For Sonia" & "Things I Do Not Know"
For Sonia
When you could barely lift your chin or fix
your eyes to read a card, you hugged his photo so hard
the bars rattled and he knew you loved him
and
That night, it was drowning in his sorries
that he did not fall asleep
after you did, your last breaths calling out for Babe.
Things I Do Not Know
Though she, in the front lawn,
is tall.
Wide. Stark,
even among the muck of hanging plants pinned to the roof of her trailer,
strawberry pots broken and rearranged amid and inside of themselves -
the way they are in my own backyard but somehow less
contained, less boheme chic
ornaments and gnomes
Christmas lights out of place in the dry and snowless grass.
She was. She stood.
Fat hands
pressed into thick hips, sitting on thighs able to bounce back an absentminded
toddler
running, barefoot
and hollering.
She was always far away.
In photos, the grandmother of all grandmothers
Breasts that could float my sleepy head across the breadth of rivers.
In person, eyes elsewhere
Mind half of on some other thing.
She escapes me. I evade her
cadence of words too-deep in swamps that suck onto my city soles
strung with names of kin I’ll never meet. Too many stories I do not understand
and the gurgling up of quick responses, short and almost mean,
though, nervous if you really pay attention.
As if
she has been made to feel small.
A. Emme Boyd is a poetess from Queens, living and writing in upstate NY. Among her favorite things are bubbles that endure blades of grass, that damp, stretched feeling one only feels after an hour of hot yoga, and the blur of roadside wild flowers. On her meandering and jagged path towards poet superstardom, she has won a Shields McIlwaine Prize for Poetry and her work can be found in Yellow Bird, BLACKBERRY, and Kalyani magazines.