Kristy Bowen

widows peak

By morning, there’s a continent lost in my hair.  A tinge of grenadine, of tobacco. An entire narrative loosening its buttons, falling in with thieves.  We are neither less so nor more so afraid than anyone else, carving our names with fish bones in the sand, the hulls of sunken ships. You’ve never seen so many changelings given over to river, to the dogs that wander the banks downstream. You extract the bones from my ears.  Build a cupola. A reliquary where I stumble, am misled by curvature.  By cotton. I empty all the rooms to stop them from reeling.  Burn the carpets to kill the rot. Something about the shape of my face disquiets you.  My anxiety has a house and a fence and a deer in the yard.  A zip code. A plague of starlings.

satellite

 Say what you want, but the moon makes a nice disaster.  A window to climb into or out of.  I steal peaches from the neighbors.  Pearl earrings.  Dream of dark fish swimming the interior.  Repeat my name in the mirror seven times and wait to disappear.  This door inside me drawn with a stick of chalk opening to a catwalk, a murder.  I wait to bleed in the woods where the girls sing my name from the trees, ruined by romance novels and the swell beneath their dresses.  Upstairs, my mother rips the stitches from everything she's ever sewn.  There's nothing you can say to me that doesn't sound like no.

Kristy Bowen is the author of the fever almanac (Ghost Road Press, 2006) and in the bird museum (Dusie, 2008). as well as the forthcoming girl show (Ghost Road, 2009). She lives in Chicago, where she runs dancing girl press & studio, devoted to publishing work by women authors.