I knew the end when I knew the beginning.

All through spring’s bright violence he carried

his teeth like a threat. I was trying to see

if I could claw and tooth my way into a love

or something like the television showed me

in its pinkest scenes. I hadn’t thought or

learned that to want has little to do with to have,

that to love can mean too little. The laugh track cackled,

put the seams in the show. I decided to see nothing

but a bird in the winged pages of the book

flying from his hands just past my head,

and I decided to see his hands as gentle, too,

plucking the reds petalled off a rose’s staid

center. What a ridiculous metaphor. By August

I stood there, timber gone to tinder. Nothing

was worth it except the gorgeous release.

Emma Bolden (she/her) is a queer, chronically ill writer from Alabama. She is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis (Soft Skull), and the poetry collections House Is an Enigma, medi(t)ations, and Maleficae. Her work has appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, the New England Review, The Seneca Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and Shenandoah. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she is an editor of Screen Door Review: Literary Voices of the Queer South.