All in by Bonnie Jill Emanuel
by Bonnie Jill Emanuel
In the blizzard you could barely
see the paper birch, nothing but
cold monochromatic clips ghost
white, you could feel yourself
blown sideways. You could see
yourself as in a film. The tree
shows in the slow frozen
fragile way the poem sometimes
anxiously strips down. Duct tape-
colored lenticel strips on bark.
The film is a poem. As if your
thoughts are separating from
you, small beetles. Silent, dense
base of tree now buried in snow,
hiding. They say a birch grows
in a V to sun. Does the world
feel violent to the tree? All night
it had been snowing & everything
had become something else. If
you are a letter you are a lowercase
i. Your arms thin like twigs.
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Bonnie Jill Emanuel is the author of Glitter City. Her most recent poems and interviews can be found in American Poetry Review, Pine Hills Review, Colorado Review, RHINO, and more. Emanuel is the recipient of the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing and the Irwin and Alice Stark Poetry Prize from The City College of New York. Born in Detroit, she lives in New York.
by Bonnie Jill Emanuel
We thought it would be gone by now.
Not so. November
the skyline has begun its ice grey
emptiness. We are still
protectors in masks.
The scaffolds, city, cold gunmetal blur.
I pull my scarf closer & coil
my arms around my wire & glass body.
You stand at a distance.
I don’t say anything real
about us because it’s too windy & raw
to sit outdoors on the bench with the view
of the Brooklyn Bridge glooming.
The noon sun too buries under a cloud cover.
You remember how much
rain fell the first time we walked across.
I squint to search the small worried brown wells
that are your eyes. Your brow
a single horizontal line
sure & straight as a tree fallen across a forest bed.
I wish you would come closer.
I used to be able
to see the long creek winding in your smile.
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Bonnie Jill Emanuel is a recent graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at The City College of New York, where she received the 2020 Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing and the 2017 Stark Poetry Prize in memory of Raymond Patterson. Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Midwest Review, Love's Executive Order (poems on the Trump presidency), Chiron Review, and other fine journals. Born in Detroit, she now lives and writes in New York.
