A BIANNUAL LITERARY MAGAZINE
Domestic Industry
Emma Bolden
The silk worm worries her threads, which become a word: cocoon. A noun that carries
a verb. Change. All the best metaphors are beetle-bitten, buried. All the best dresses
are dry-clean only. We zip the straight spines of our zippers. We walk the store’s floor
in work shoes, heel by the mirror to see what our feet see. We must try to braid our hair
into ropes. Who can be sure the kitchen is no castle when the backyard bristles with thorns?
If he comes for me, I’ll wear a bracelet of brambles. I’ll know him by twilight, by last
light, I’ll know him by birds and their song. I’ll know the nothings that once were his eyes.
All through the equinox this spring was singing a song that carried no notes. So too were its
papers blank. So too do I tell him, tell me to forget the horizon. There’s no place and home.
Emma Bolden is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Maleficae (GenPop Books, 2013) and medi(t)ations, forthcoming from Noctuary Press. She’s also the author of four chapbooks of poetry – How to Recognize a Lady (Toadlily Press); The Mariner’s Wife, (Finishing Line Press); The Sad Epistles (Dancing Girl Press); This Is Our Hollywood (The Chapbook) – and one nonfiction chapbook – Geography V (Winged City Press). Her work has appeared in such journals as The Rumpus, Harpur Palate, Spoon River Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Conduit, Indiana Review, Greensboro Review, Redivider, Feminist Studies, The Journal, Guernica, and Copper Nickel.