Ice Queen, on [a] Pane

By Emily Bowles

Much suspected by me,
Nothing proved can be,
Quoth Elizabeth prisoner.

1.

Elizabeth
I wrote on her
prison window—I mean,

Elizabeth I wrote
on her
prison window

with a diamond,
gemlike betrayal
of the pain
clear pain

pane that sep-her-ates
breath from air,
hot air cold glass
hard gas becomes
stone, an elemental
betrayal

the contain-heir
contain her
container

scratch your story

2.

Ice prison engages me, engages me—a diamond ring
I feel for, I mean, it’s slippery, this ice that Matthew
McConaughey called “frosting,” too hard and too
changeable at once, elementally unstable: temporary.

3.

I scream.

4.

Ice cream, at the skating rink,
where I fell, and he gave me /
ice he’d scraped off the surface,
dirty, my feet and this defeat.

5.

I see it now from my
own window
pain:
a spider web clinging,
turned to ice, harder than a web
but vulnerable to
heatstory,
and without a die man,
I cannot make a mark
sharp enough,
hard enough
to see myself in
this ice pain
this glass pain
that separates me from
icesilk storythreads clinging
to the pane’s unbreakening.

---

Emily Bowles received a PhD in English and Certificate in Women’s Studies from Emory University in 2004. In her first chapbook, His Journal, My Stella (Finishing Line Press, 2018), she explores her experiences of gendered and sexual silencing in graduate school through the story of the subject of her thesis, Jonathan Swift. She has received the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets’ Triad Award, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and an artist residency with the Appleton Public Library. Her second chapbook, The Satisfactory Nothing of Girls, was published in 2021.