Emily Banks

Emily Banks lives in Atlanta, where she is a doctoral candidate and poetry lecturer at Emory University. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Superstition Review, Blood Orange Review, Cimarron Review, Yemassee, and storySouth. Her first book, Mother Water, is forthcoming from Lynx House Press.

Crossing the Bridge

The berries on the bridge I walk across
each day have turned a dusky mauve.

My mother calls. The mustang mare is sick.
So far away, but once I took the breath

from her muzzle through my nostrils,
chest. The devil lets

us beat our hands like hooves against
the bare soil, at the end of winter when

the fresh white powder that intoxicated us
for months reveals a lie,

heart rate too high,
collecting interest like clots of blood.

Grandmother told me move
your feet fast in tight loops, rotate your ankle bones

to keep your circulation from stopping.
But then hers did. My mother says

it doesn't get better. That after thirty years
of marriage, sometimes, still,

the unloved feeling gets a hold of her.
And what troll's hiding here

beneath this bridge, waiting for
withering fruit to fall, for freeze

to trip me up? I too am vicious.
Every day I pick

a berry from the bush, split it in half,
dissect its reproductive organs

with my nails. They'd do the same to mine
if I let them.