 |  |  |
week of February 19 - 25, 2007
BECOME A POET OF THE WEEK
click. here.for. submission .guidelines
A Man With No Teeth Serves Us Breakfast | I'd Like to Bake Your Goods | Stolen Mummies | Brendan Constantine is My Kind of Town
Up Liberty's Skirt | Feeding Holy Cats | Mowing Fargo | I'm a Jew, Are You? | Lizard King of the Laundromat | I Am My Own Orange County
Paris: It's The Cheese |
Poetry Super Highway | Judaic Links | Rick's Bookmarks | Cobalt Poets
E-mail Rick | Other Cool Rick Stuff / Upcoming Readings | Who The Hell Is Rick
Kristy Bowen
wickedpen74@yahoo.com
Bio (auto)
Kristy Bowen lives in Chicago where she writes poems and makes vague attempts at collage and book arts. She is the author of the fever almanac (Ghost Road Press, 2006) and feign (New Michigan Press, 2007), as well as another project, in the bird museum, forthcoming from Dusie Press Books. She is also the editor of the online lit zine wicked alice and founder of dancing girl press, devoted to publishing work by women writers.
The following work is Copyright © 2007, and owned by Kristy Bowen and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
Again, I dream I've killed you.
The back of your dress taking on
rain and the windows fogging over.
I dream a radio and a bedroom.
I dream a button and a bead.
Someone who looks like you
but more like me, moaning
into the backseat.We both smell like sugar and wax.
Both trace our names against the glass.
Like sisters. Only better.
Bless us for our mothers.
For the yellow hair dyed black.
For the rum in our cokes
that makes us lovelier.
This thing that burns behind us
grown fierce and clumsy as our fingers.
the imagined lives of ghostsPerhaps they are, after all, godless.
Licking the finials and mothering
strange black dogs. The boxwoods
alone accumulate thousands,
precarious as jukebox lovesongs.
All of them enamored with objects.
In love with birthday cake and
the backs of stamps. See how they
rhyme in couplets, how their
shoes don't match their skirts.
And velvet. Yes, velvet.
As if any of us have enough.
As if the low-watt gleam
of silver guardrails doesn't charm us.
How even the road bends to meet them.
swerveI am bending toward the headlights
when the sound goes out. One minute
the wind in my throat, my hair,
and the next nothing. I had three sisters,
I tell you, and each of them a china figurine.
A man, he took my sweater and gave me drink.
Took my keys. Took my name down in a book
and offered to drive me home. I can't stop
these headaches. The jagged glass beneath my
tongue. I wear my quiet like a charm bracelet
tinkling at my wrist. This body practically
a crime scene by now, all dusted and closed.
My sisters cry and make wreaths. You wouldn't
believe how hot my hands are right now.
How tiny my fingers.
burnThe tail light put the dark
in her mouth, this rubied gleam.Black lake beneath her nightgown
littered with sparklers and romancandles. At home, the stockyard filth
in her mother's kitchen sulliesthe mended bedspreads.The bleached
bones of peaches. She breathesa little sometimes. Swallows a silver
locket lifted from the thrift store.Not the real girl with the dress
rehearsal and the geometry of sixes.But the one gone musty in the throat.
Gone deep in the milk white.
roadside inventory
The ribs are a lovely museum, you know. All spooks and idling Chevrolets. Amazing the glow that finds its way into open spaces. This mouth like a broken reflector, a length of silver chain. I've carved a heart in the tar that lines the shoulder and assembled my name in bottlecaps. In ditches, the discarded tires resemble murders. Slender pickets of crosses lingering at their margins. There's a racket in the things left behind. Each name a handbag or a hairpin. The forked heat of backseats. My limbs are riddled with sisters lurching along interstates. Their pink shoes abandoned at the turn. How they all lie down like this. Lie down like this. Lie down like this.
C.P. Aboobacker
cpaboobacker@gmail.com