Poetry / Kristy Bowen

:: From WINGED ::

	
In this story, your mother swallowed an egg, screamed,
	and birthed a monster. After the fishermen had their way

with her, a mapmaker loved her. Would bring her lace gloves
	and lavender perfume. Copper pennies to line her mouth.

She wouldn't be the last thing that crawled from the mud
	and learned to fly, but she was the prettiest, once you rinsed

her off in the bath. Once you remembered how the swamp
	swallows all sound. A feral stillness filled with wriggling

and writhing things that could kill you. Her feathers were thick
	with algae, nails crusted with dirt. Places on her body still

unmapped by his hands even after a decade. Places in her heart
	dark and unreachable as a grove of cypress in moonlight.

You'd hide beneath her skirts at the table while she sipped tea
	in a room covered in flowers. Lie down under the settee

breathing slow. Soak in the clawfoot tub and cover yourself
	in petals. In which you'd make a garden of your body,

                        in which you'd make a grave.

~

Mostly, you longed to be one of the women
	who could carry the sky in her bones. Could curtsy

and shift their weight to the other foot. Could root through
	the garden and find only church socials and sweet tea recipes.

Praline sweet and scented like lavender. To be clean and close
	to god, who rustled his feathers in the rafters every now

and then, watching as you touched yourself. Everyone touched
	by something—holiness, madness—no one knew which.

Hoarding the bones of mice in small piles under the bed. Birthing
	tiny eggs you'd hide in the closet, then bury in the ground.

Whether they hatched, you never knew, eaten by snakes or
	smashed by starlings. You'd wear sleeves in the summer to hide

the filthy down that covered your arms. Would open your mouth
	and something crawly would slip out wriggling and drop to

your desk. You'd stare in horror while the other girls
	picked feathers from your hair and cooed.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I’ve repeat­ed­ly found that, as my work evolves, the sub­ject of trans­for­ma­tion comes up again and again. Specif­i­cal­ly women turn­ing into mon­sters or mon­sters turn­ing into women. The idea of trans­gres­sion and lim­i­ta­tion held in bal­ance with free­dom and evo­lu­tion of the self that fas­ci­nates me. I’ve writ­ten many poems about women that become oth­er things—dog women, mall zom­bies, bird girls, rav­en­ous vam­pires. About myths where women are blessed or forced to become deer, sirens, trees. To bend their shapes into new con­fig­u­ra­tions to escape fear, vio­lence, con­trol. This par­tic­u­lar set of poems is set in New Orleans, which is my sec­ond favorite city to Chica­go, and where I prob­a­bly would live if I could not live here. A city filled with mon­sters and ghosts and mag­ic from which the women in these poems emerge, feath­ered and starv­ing. Set­ting it in the 1930s is prob­a­bly a result of repeat­ed the­aterview­ings of Sin­ners and an obses­sion with the Hadestown Broad­way sound­track, but there is some­thing about the Depres­sion era that res­onates with these char­ac­ters that seems a per­fect fit. 

A writer & book artist, Kristy Bowen lives in Chica­go, where she cre­ates a vari­ety of poet­ry hybrid works and exper­i­ments that enfold text, visu­al art, per­for­mance, film, and more. She is the author of numer­ous books, chap­books, zines, and artists books, includ­ing CLOVEN, a new col­lec­tion of poems and col­lages cen­tered around the Greek fig­ure of Iphi­ge­nia. For the past two decades, she’s blogged about writ­ing, art, hor­ror films, thrift­ing, and oth­er­mis­cel­lany at DULCETLY: NOTES ON A BOOKISH LIFE. She also runs DANCING GIRL PRESS & STUDIO, where she makes and sells all man­ner of art, books, paper goods and acces­sories. Raised in the wilds of north­ern Illi­nois, she inhab­its a beau­ti­ful, but drafty, art deco build­ing near the lake with sev­er­al mon­grel cats, her hus­band, too many books, and a vast col­lec­tion of thrift­ed finds—only some of which are haunt­ed.