Box

Emma Winsor Wood

  1. I’m not a rare beauty eating a peach beside some blushing roses
  2. “A beauty is a princess because a princess is very special” my daughter (3) says when asked to define it
  3. Another definition (around Halloween): “a mummy is an invisible person”
  4. I heard “mommy” & nodded stunned nodded yes, yes unseen
  5. Seen & not heard is how my children relate to me mostly
  6. Mostly others also, even grown-ups, with the children around
  7. Around my students, undergrads, the same thing—I talk talk talk & they nod nod yet when asked a question they say excuse me, what, can you repeat that
  8. A mime traces the edges of a secret box
  9. (suggestively)
  10. May I suggest a change of course—the box, for instance, is a lovely, slow-growing hedge ideal for enclosing property so gradually not even observant neighbors will notice it’s happening till your house is hidden from view
  11. …
  12. Let’s box this up shall we
  13. No
  14. When I have more numbers I will be dead

Emma Winsor Wood is the author of the poetry collections Preferred Internal Landscape (Ornithopter Press, 2025) and The Real World (BlazeVOX, 2022). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Missouri Review, The Drift, The American Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA, Fence, and Bennington Review.

CAPGRAS