Emma Bolden
Dara-Lyn Shrager is the co-founder and editor of Radar Poetry. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and a BA from Smith College. Her poems appear in many journals, including The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Greensboro Review, Thrush, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, and Yemassee. Her articles have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Magazine, and The New York Times. Her poetry collection, Whiskey, X-Ray, Yankee was published by Barrow Street Press in 2018.




Tornado Weather


​The last high sweat of an August
sun wet my sundress, I couldn’t

believe how fast the urge took me
nowhere & no named, I stepped

from that bad rust bucket of a car &
became a good pack of nothing, just

a bunch of bones roped together under blue
& white gingham, under a sky that flashed

its grin at me like I was the emergency.
That set my teeth on the edge

of the hotel sink until morning
came & I still hadn’t decided

who I wanted to be except gone.
A cage is a trap but a home is worse,

walls papered with all the what
evers I can’t stop remembering to forget.

I stuck my thumb into the roadside, the air,
& when no one stopped I hitched a ride

on my own two feet. At least
I’ve managed, kept my weathers quiet

in a nowhere only I have mapped
where mind is both the shelter & the storm.

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Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage (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.
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