Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started

Tag: Kristy Bowen

Even the azaleas are anxious…

Mood: half-anxious, half-resigned | Drinking: dreams

fret_wall

Fear and love sometimes feel the same, like a thousand violent butterflies beating their wings against your stomach, shredding their way out.

Hope, as I’ve said before, is a knife edge. And I am currently quivering with hope and fear. Knives and butterflies.

I think my current state is quite aptly described by the word “anxious”, with a side of “nervous” and a pinch of “fretful” thrown in. But I’m working, oh so hard, to be zen about it. To say, “what will be, will be.” And be ok with that.

It’s just that I don’t know what will be. And in the not-knowing lies the anxiety.

Let me be all cryptic for now. I’ll explain on the other side. Deal?

Until then, a little Kristy Bowen to make us all feel better. Or at least to make me feel better…

fret
by Kristy Bowen

Lets say a woman’s heart
is like a windup bird.
The conservatory filled
with oranges and the cellar
disordered, unstable
with the pull of thieves

gathering outside the windows.
I’ve invented this: the panic,
copper tongued and shaken.
I’m dizzied, dulcet.
A thin layer of graphite
blooming beneath my skin.

And here, my sleight of hand,
my tour de force,
skirts come all undone
and tapping out code beneath
the dressing table. I am
impossibly lovely, impossibly
fixed against the horizon.
Any attempt at flight
ruining all the furniture.

***

-Lo, beating wings and biting nails.

Beautiful Bowen

paperwings
Mood: Pleased
Drinking: Diet DP

I don’t fall in love with other poets very often. My list of favorites is a very short one.

But Kristy Bowen has made it into the top 5.

I read her Ghost Road Press book, The Fever Almanac, a few months ago, and I dragged the reading of it out, on and on, just snippets a day, to make it last longer.

I’m doing the same thing now with Feign, and I have to share it with you, because this poem just makes me happy.

And this week we could all use a little happiness, no? Black predictions on the left and on the right, sky falling in and Wall Street crumbling and whatnot.

I could use a little extra beauty mixed in with all the truth. A heavy-handed dose of sugar and paper wings.

So here we have some beautiful Bowen. It just might do the trick:

HOW TO READ THIS POEM

I suggest a system. A lifeboat. Or at the very least a bathtub.

I suggest you sit down.

I suggest the bird at your shoulder be ruby-throated with a milky eye.
That it say inappropriate things at inappropriate times.

I suggest bringing something ruined. Or broken. Or drunk.

I suggest you take the south road. Slip beneath the piano and
out the trap door. Sneak up on it from behind.

I suggest you take a snack. An umbrella. A dictionary.

I suggest you start slowly.

I suggest you read the red skirt as a metaphor for sex. The fistful of poppies
languishing in their vase.

I suggest everything is a metaphor for sex. Even the bird.

I suggest you mind the foil, toiling in the background. It’s all very
Shakespearean. Even her red hair, Shakespearean.

I suggest you take the setting into consideration. Or here, where the
narrative slips off its track.

I suggest you look askance when the woman opens her arms and lowers
them.

I suggest you be kind. But distracted.

-Lo, in need of many, many more lovely things.