#ash bowen

[joanbpoet]

The Last Love Letter of Marie Curie         Polish-born Marie Sklodowska made great scientific achievements in radiology after moving to Paris, where she married French physicist Pierre Curie before dying from long-term exposure to radiation.

Please put me with your hands. My palms are empty. I counted down from ten each time I dared to think you loved me. Now, of course, I'm scared I'll seduce the second world too soon and empty this first one out before I've finished it. Among my scattered notes you'll find the first heart I ever drew. Written in the worst French, Please, put me with your hands. And it meant that I wanted to feel surrendered to. Some nights, awake, I wonder why we leave the dust behind that we do. Does grief grieve itself? The cells and circumstances we liken to living are what slough away. We've seen the light that grows inside us. Long as bones. And white.

Copyright © 2024 Ash Bowen All rights reserved from The Shore

[allyourprettywords]

“Wolf,” Ash Bowen

          Caused by a deletion of chromosome 4, Ulrich Wolf Syndrome produces           death in the bulk of children born with it.                   —rarediseases.com

I’ve sweated through the panting night.

I prowl the hills above the house where you’ve hidden our daughter from the fangs

of my DNA, the chemistry firing this bloodstream.

Something signals me to skulk the pasture with the soft paw of the body, to snap the hasp and climb inside the kitchen window.

A wolf’s no scavenger. Hunger licks its tongue across the danger of my teeth.

I snuffle after our daughter’s scent rising like a light below a door in a darkened hallway.

I’ve sharpened my claws on the black night of the kitchen. The moon’s burning out in the bottom of my bowl.

Our daughter’s so little, I could swallow her whole.

[mortalpractice]

            Braven Hand, whose beak-like nose earned him the nickname of "Raven," was hanged for the             murder of his lover, Pattismith Oakes, in Tinsman, Arkansas in 1887. Letters written to Oakes'             family were later found to be forgeries that Hand had written in an effort to prove that she was             still alive. Inexplicably, many of the letters speak of her being held against her will. Mother—                I've made myself into a sea my husband cannot pilot. The nights he paddles across my body, I turn my stomach into a storm of rocks rising from the waters. I clabber my mouth with milk before he comes to kiss, ignore the figs he brings me to freshen the bite of my breath. Ten times he's capsized our bed searching for a son but I've drowned every seed he's put inside of me. Whenever he leaves, I cast my fingers over the lands I've found hidden in his maps—countries smaller than my hands but close enough to row to. Each time he returns, he finds me huddled before the shore—staring past the ships that slap against the fence, the ocean he's somehow boarded up.

—Ash Bowen, "Letter Written in a Raven's Fist," published in The Adroit Journal

[missedstations]

“The Astronaut Explains Divorce to Me” - Ash Bowen

Your father’s like a far-flung rocket, a G-force orbiter funneling through the stratosphere. Each day he screens the perimeter of our atmosphere to keep us safe from ray guns aimed from outer space, leaves us notes he’s written with his vapor trails. But at night, the frequency of your grief keeps him homing through our house. He meets your mother glowing in her latest wedding gown, her hand heavy with the bloom of stars I’ve laid upon her finger. The gentle thing’s to leave your father to the memory of the spheres. Lonely but bobbing in his armor, nothing can hurt his heart up there.

[rawmeatgrl-blog]

Letter from a Mistress by Ash Bowen

I was a bird when you wanted a wife. So I flew, collecting what I knew of wives— hotel keys to unlock the lace they lay across their down- less bodies, champagne corks to keep their mouths from buzzing all the flowers. You made me a hummingbird. Blur of desire. One word. Finish what you started. Here is where you hung your promises. Hear them hiss across my body.

[allyourprettywords]

"Whatever Monster," Ash Bowen

I’m sad for what our bodies never made, for the days we rose, fully rested, from sleep no childish thing had interrupted. What’s made our lives a stalled biology doesn’t sleep; it clamors in the womb, scaring children. Our nightstand spills with useless cures we’ve tried. Whatever monster turns our would-be children to blood each month cannot be stopped (we’ve tried).

On lusty nights let’s cinch ourselves together, knowing the halves we have to put together won’t come to something we can love together. And when we feel alone, let’s face each other and do the things we could only do together, like say we’re happy to convince each other.

[allyourprettywords]

"Letter from a Mistress," Ash Bowen

I was a bird when you wanted a wife. So I flew, collecting what I knew of wives— hotel keys to unlock the lace they lay across their down- less bodies, champagne corks to keep their mouths from buzzing all the flowers.

You made me a hummingbird. Blur of desire. One word. Finish what you started. Here is where you hung your promises. Hear them hiss across my body.

[poem-locker]

Ash Bowen, "The Astronaut Explains Divorce to Me"

Your father’s like a far-flung rocket, a G-force orbiter funneling through the stratosphere. Each day

he screens the perimeter of our atmosphere to keep us safe from ray guns

aimed from outer space, leaves us notes he’s written with his vapor trails.

But at night, the frequency of your grief keeps him homing through

our house. He meets your mother glowing in her latest wedding gown, her hand heavy

with the bloom of stars I’ve laid upon her finger. The gentle thing’s to leave your father to the memory

of the spheres. Lonely but bobbing in his armor, nothing can hurt his heart up there.