This book is all about leaves. There is no tree.
Leaves don’t drop straight but rather slant, wing, skim.
They slip as paper boats.
A boy I once knew built me a canoe out of paper
birch peel but I wouldn’t climb in so he sailed it away.
The verb, leaf, means to make foliage, or to turn through pages
haphazardly.
I skim love like the book is not about me.
Lately my poems slip in & out of tenses.
I will make foliage I have made foliage I am making
foliage.
Once, my mother always had to leave.
O, I said to no one. O to the sequins & feathers, oh, I say
with my eyelids falling,
maybe things are that much more beautiful when you can’t exactly
know them.
Like bark beetles, terpene, sweet woodruff decay.
The moon when the sky grows violent is covered in cold deep purples.
I make a full moon shape with my mouth then cover the hole quick with a mitten so
no one can peer down inside.
In a dream I see the blue-green Jack pine out front of my childhood.
Snow falling. Silver cones & fascicles.
Where I turned through the window as she was taken away.
In my green velvet shift I look like a leaf.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 5.
Bonnie Jill Emanuel’s poetry appears in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, and other publications. She holds an MFA from The City College of New York where she received the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing, and the Irwin and Alice Stark Poetry Prize. Her first full-length collection is forthcoming in 2024 from Cornerstone Press (UWSP).
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