Bluebells line the road to the boneyard.
Spread themselves like maidens over rock
and crook. Hook themselves into treacherous
places. I was no more than a girl when the master
slipped a hand inside my frock. A flock
of ravens scaping. The landscape gray and brown
and broken by fence lines. I was his until I wasn’t,
feasting on fatted lamb and fetid water from
the chapel well. Fervent with fear and forest clearings.
So much death inside me, my eyes turned blue black
and I’d birth the strangest things beneath the coverlet.
Three legged rabbits and blind foxes, broken swallows
and the occasional snake. He’d bury
them in the garden and begin again,
his black fingers staining my thighs.
❧
The children grow fat on roast mutton.
Thrust their greasy fingers through keyholes
and mail slots. Suddenly there were more
of them. Sliding down bannisters
and placing their hands over my eyes.
I drowned three of them in the bathtub,
another in the lake, but still there are more.
Dripping water on the floors of the parlor
and crawling into my bed. Fed on neglect,
they thrive. Ravaging the beehives and scavenging
the pantry. A small cold palm slithers into my own
as you set them on fire in the chapel, but they
are too small and damp to burn. Too hearty with spite.
How they frighten the maids with their weeping
Keep finding their way home.
❧
The woman in the attic sings the house
into an inferno, singes the linens with
her anger. Keeps pulling the sheets
from the bed in the night while you sleep.
She writes messages on the mirror over the dresser.
Confesses her sins over the dinner table,
levitating the china brought back from France
till it’s a pile of rubble. The trouble was you
looked like her in certain light. But tamer.
Curvaceous, but plainer. In the dark,
It’s all the same to him. Their honeymoon,
many moons ago, and all the rooms inside
her on fire. And now you, smoking beneath
your ribs like an oven. How you dowsed the
room in kerosene then lie down over him.
Under him. Let it take you both in ecstasy
while she twitched excitedly in the corner.
A writer and book artist working in both text and image, Kristy Bowen is the author of a number of chapbook, zine, and artists book projects, as well as eight full-length collections of poetry/prose/hybrid work, including the recent SEX & VIOLENCE (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). Bowen holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia College and an MA in Literature from DePaul University. She lives in Chicago, where she runs dancing girl press & studio and spends much of her time writing, making papery things, and editing a chapbook series devoted to women authors. See more at www.kristybowen.net.