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Computer Virus Spreads to Humans

No one knew the source of it, but the horses caught whiff of it first, like fire that spread down the canyon and into our beds. Not flame, but a fizz, like after lighning.

Then a slow hiss like a soda bottle. I was kissing everyone in those days--bartenders and stock brokers, Their money-love collected in my mouth. Dripping out

the corners. Spread by horny teenagers and housewives banging the tax man. We were all complicit. Contagious. Free falling along the freeways. Jacked in, jerking off

to the women who took it, deep throated, with a smile. My blood was electric, prone to blackouts and bad reception. The men angry in their basements they'd go off like firecrackers

in public places--the movie theatre, the mall. The bodies they left behind would line up and drop into a swimming pool full of ones and zeros. All of us complicit in the green glow.

from PLUMP

For every witch in every story, there is a girl, stumbling blind through the forest. A flourish of gingham and eyelet apron strings. Dirty black boots. For every child, a mountain of desiccated locusts, a plague of bloody eggs. No one would have guessed her a changeling if it weren't for her mouth, sewn up at night and opened again every morning filled with bees. When the villagers came for her, she was in the kitchen, making soup from the head of an ox. Sewing a doll made of straw that looked vaguely like her mother. How they dragged her on her knees to the forest, where they tried to fix her. Couldn't quite kill her. Too many holes in her body to fill. Too many hives in her belly. For every witch left bloody by the side of the road, there is a child slowly eating its way from the inside out. Gorging on honey, sugared and seething.

read more here .

the kissing disease

Sometimes, I am too suggestible. Both exquisite and satin-hipped, moving through December like a doll within a doll. I am always too exciteable, this contagion sweet on a boy's tongue. I pretend that we are moving further and further apart, like halving an orange and then halving it again. Or a curtain unfolding and unfolding to reveal a ballerina, ice lipped in a white dress. You wouldn't believe the things I want sometimes. Like now, the fever blooming inside me, scented like milkweed and snow. The enormous tangle of branches that give way to a tiny kitten heart. This river looks fake, all singing children and dirndls. But then, so do your hands, pulling me toward you in the truck. I braid my hair and pretend it comes natural to me as breathing. This little disease caught in my throat. It might be a butterfly. It might be a knife. All night, my ribs are a sleepy furnace, where small colonies make scrimshaw drawings of strange beasts. You wouldn't believe the things they want.

from HAVOC

the summer house

Soon, the baby is full of bees.  Bees in the bathtub, bees in the bassinet. Floating the surface of your coffee each morning without fail, tiny wings sticky with cream. Who can be a good mother amidst all this hum, the summer house thick with hives. The lives you've given up to get there.  Every tiny shoe, every tiny spoon slick with honey. Who can be a good mother to a child made of wax, even now softening in the sun.

from the summer house

eleanor and the tiny machines

read it here:

apocalypse theory

The pharmacist loves my apocalypse theory like a son. His nights are full of snow and broken dishes, but he’s all about the bad decisions. I still have my mother’s hands, and sometimes, they fumble over details, stumble against door jambs and make a teakettle sound. Hand over hand, mind over matter. People were dying in their parked cars and I kept dreaming the bed was a boat was yet another bad decision. The pharmacist spent too much time jaywalking and not enough time adjusting the optical illusions. Everyone’s retinas were scarred and wide like scared deer. Everyone’s hands looked like my mother’s especially when they were washing the dishes or especially when they were waving goodbye.

from BLOOM

The internet tells me one morning that dolphins swim the Venice canals and I've no choice but to believe in them. Their slick purpose, backs sluiced with sunlight. Flamingos flock in Indian streets, thick, black cows languishing luxurious on beaches in the south of France. A coyote in the middle of the Mag Mile mid-day. But really, the canals were rising every year, seeping onto the boards of rotting docks while the lovers kissed under bridges. The internet tells me the waters in Italy are crystal clear, all that sediment settling beneath the city. Strangers kiss each other on the cheek and the grandmothers nap on shaded porches. We've convinced ourselves nothing can go so wrong here. Nothing we can’t quite see the bottom of.

landscape / architecture

(paper collage)

Kristy Bowen

2011

bad touch

Oh mother, your daughters are spindled and wayward, littering the back porch with cigarettes and crying in the grocery store. When the clock says five, we line up, count our tiny pills on the basin. I’m a broken watch, a bridesmaid dress. There’s no key to this car except the one I swallowed. I was singing in the backseat when I was stolen, twirled beneath the lanterns, the space beneath my back warm and grassy. The Ouija board said wait, so I waited bleeding in the bushes for a man in a suit. The Ouija board said run. He handled me like he was breaking kindling. Made me wear a dark red dress where the backyards were barbed wire and smoldering trees. I found a child and held onto her until the rain made it hard to see. Found a cricket in my pocket, a rusty wire in my milk. I closed the drapes and hid beneath the bed. Oh mother, the bedspreads were awful that year.

from HAVOC

blackmail fantasy

On Thursday, I take a train to a town with a gas station and one stoplight. Wear a black coat and dream all night about wolves skirting the parking lots. My hope is a single bright balloon caught in January trees, a fakery, a delightful amnesia. Needless to say, you’ll do what I want because of the lingerie and possibly because I can fit an entire apple in my mouth without gagging. Still, I cry a lot, on buses, on airplanes. It takes so little energy it’s almost like Stockholm syndrome. All the houses are full of daughters, all the daughters full of milk and tissue paper, of 7th grade slumber parties. I fall in love with them too easily, with your wife in her tiny box. I am so dangerous, even the wallpaper hates me. The gas station attendant eyes my pockets suspiciously. Everything I say sounds like candy hearts, all sugar and pink pastels. This is the worst part of the game where I want and want and want. I play this part so sweetly you practically forget my teeth. Something keeps moving around my ankles like a cat, or possibly a small fox.

http://www.dancinggirlpress.com/havoczine.pdf

pelt

In the mountains, we play animal, vegetable, monster. Write our names in the dirt. Flies gather on the tiny cakes, the crinoline spread cross our laps. We tried to make a society of it. Making art and drinking tea in tiny cups. But the mice kept darting into through our shadows. The pears kept rotting on the trees. We tried to be beautiful, but still we were dying slowly. Our teeth rotting in our mouths as we plied our loves with sweet words and poetry. Shitting in the bushes while the birds sang like they, too, were dying and ants carried the picnic slowly away.

https://issuu.com/aestheticsofresearch/docs/pelt_zine_electronic

dimestore operetta

Say I’m the girl in the yard,

holding her shoes. Holding

her arm, her papers and rain.

Dolled-up, doe-eyed,

doled out. In the house,

a riddle, a rattle, a clutter

of cutlery. An aviary.

Where I’m bedeviled,

bewildered, beheaded.

My white-hot, white dress.

My open-ended, open all night.

from major characters in minor films (Sundress Publications, 2015)

the deer maiden

Her father was a hunter. The blunt end of his rifle bruising her shoulder.  The threads on the dressing gown fraying in the morning frost. Her father was a killer, a maker of widows.  all the windows mossed over and crusted with earth. Her father, a builder, but all his rooms tilted. Everything always off kilter, the beds sliding across the floors in the night.  Her father was drinker, his hands gone bleary with rage. At night, he destroyed the cabin, tables overturned and shattered plates. How he rebuilt it every morning before she woke.  In the meadow, she raised the rifle and he lurched to the left.  The heft of his body as she dropped it into the river while a dozen does looked on.

from STRANGERIE

by Kristy Bowen

#poetry bookarts collage darkacademia writing visualart gothic oracle

from ARTIST STATEMENTS

The poem wants to keep itself small. Like the body. To cut away the bloated sac of mothering and swim free. I made a poem out of words and wire.  Hardware plucked from broken radios and busted  tv sets. But much of it rusted, then crumbled in my hands.  I made it out of tinsel, out of paper streamers soaked and bled in the rain.  From curdled milk. The sets were too elaborate to keep, silk divans and a sideboard filled with rubies. The whirlpool in the bathtub I kept tossing babies into. Everything filthy-- the bottoms of my feet, fingers sticky with sap. But eventually,  a body as transparent and frail as a jellyfish floating the colder currents out to sea.

~Kristy Bowen

kristybowen.net

video poem | swallow

@ dulcetly | glamorous decay

Indeed, if the culture at large were asked to imagine a poet, they would not see most of us with our day jobs and our piles of unvanquished laundry but moreso the traveling flaneuse, who never had to work to earn money, but somehow it was always available. Who had long, winding days to sleep til the afternoon and then bang away at a typewriter til night, when we would then hang out at readings and bars and carouse with other writers until dawn. We wouldn't have children, or electric bills, or anything getting in the way of our brilliance.

https://kristybowen.blogspot.com/2019/01/glamorous-decay.html

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