The Working Girl’s Grimoire Kristy Bowen
The Working Girl’s Grimoire Kristy Bowen dancing girl press, 2021
Pieces in this series appeared previously in talking about strawberrrries all the time.
spell for the lonely Begin with your own shadow on subway tiles. The pile of gas rags and broken barricades at the end of the platform. How one frigid night, you watched them burn the tracks to thaw them in the rail yard. Like so many things, not sure if it was a disaster or completely common. The window washer that seemed like he was flying but was really falling. his leg broken by the rope in three places. He was back at work a week later in a cast, balancing above the city on his tight rope. The pictures of men on early skyscrapers holding sandwiches. The waitress balancing on one foot at the diner, runs in her stockings. How she was beautiful and sad, and maybe more beautiful because of it, You can't think in the bathrooms, for all the secretaries crying over lost mothers and lovers. For all the lipstick smears on the mirror. You'd write your name there and it would rub right off.
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spell for married men Begin with your wife's rosemary plants. Lined up on the kitchen window. The selves she shed to get here. The pantry shelves with too much macaroni, but never enough salt. Your fault she burned the eggs for weeks straight and singed her hand on the stove. There were too many dishes, so you stopped having sex. Sex, the siren turned dowager who donned her hat and maidly umbrella and set sail for further shores. No one knows where she drowned, there amid the pans caked with sauce and the lonely olive floating a spoon. She tried to pull you to the sink one night to listen, hands down your pants, but you couldn't hear the weeping over all the rattling coffee mugs. You'd leave them half-full on the desk every day for months, Where she'd line them up and see what sprouted in their black, fertile, bottoms.
spell for the traveler Under the new moon, everything looks like blood. The sky, the Mississippi. When you close your eyes, red blooms like algae at the edges. When the man in the French Quarter placed his hands over your face and spun you around, you saw not stars, but red, dark moon. Soon, you were lost in cobbled streets, hobbling through voodoo shops with 50 cent knock-offs. The medium who grabbed your wrists and inquired whether you were okay. But then it was all relative. The heat, your slow sweat beneath gas lamps. A sign above a flat said it was haunted, but then so is the body. All its crooked nooks and spiders in the rafters. No room for the living in all that clatter. No room for magnolias, dropped blossom by blossom into the river.
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spell for uneven floors Begin with rosewater, rubbed on the wrists and throat. The places only his mouth goes. Throw out the bathwater with the baby, the baby with the stove that smells of gas eve on a good day. Be prepared for thunder. What wonder when the sky lifted itself above the buildings and came back as rain. The lake swollen and barely in its banks. All of it surely a delusion, brought on by whiskey and lack of sleep. How the furniture was always creeping across the room when you weren't looking, The books that disappeared from the shelf. How you were always hooking your ankle on the ottoman in the dark. Hunting the hammer, the slotted spoon in the depths of other closets. The faucets that dripped a steady rhythm that sometimes corresponded to your heart. The pipes that rusted and ruined every towel.
spell for the somnambulist Overnight, work men dismantle the kitchen. Replace countertops and cupboard doors and soon you do not recognize your own house. The place where the paint cracks on the ceiling reveals a river of water near where the train tracks split the room. We keep moving the couch to the other side, but the light down the tunnel grows larger and larger. Last week it took out the bookshelves. Took the tail off the cat. Even the neighbors, strange and clamorous through the hole in the wall, where you find an entirely new house, full of everything you lost. Single shoe. Broken clock. Frocks and feathers and strange furred creatures gone slack on hangers. You'd even find your mother there sometimes, alive again and crawling the floors. She'd never get it clean in time. The inner space, so much more vast than the outer. The thin wall that separated them nothing but a row of curtains you were always hiding in, but still too scared to look behind.
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spell for bad credit Begin with a 20 dollar bill. Burnt. Ashes in a jar. How far the bridge seems from where you standing. It's all perception. The man on the boat who said "It's just money!" then put his hand on your thigh and squeezed. The breeze smelled like lake water--dead fish and summer. How you were too high and too tipsy, in danger of toppling into the drink. Each week, counting out nickels for the grocery store and coming up short. How to account for all the expenses. Your wisdom teeth, broken wrist, Chunk of hair and heart and eye. The cabin bunk where you traded a kiss for a cherry ring pop. The man at the 1 AM bus stop, decades later, who offered you a 20 just to let him touch you, over your clothes and your eyes closed. You didn't take it, but you could have. Felt his fingers move over your dress. The exchange in the expectation, how he was so lonely it made your chest ache. So serious, you almost said yes.
spell for anxiety For every lost lover the world gives you several stray cats. A series of bats in the attic. Static cling and broken dishes. For every lost house, ghosts and rattling the doors. The back of cereal boxes and several wrought iron fences. What you thought was motion was only vibration. There in the space beneath the body as it clamored from parking lot to dive bar. As you tied a rope around the most solid thing you could find that turned out to be the sea. Nothing could hold the weight of you, you were so light. Like the cars picked up by cyclones that took anything without roots. But still, you doused the room in lavender oil and boiled the kettle dry with broth. Kept trying to loosen the knots around your throat with your fingernails, the end of a pen. Nothing worked until you opened your mouth and out flew the fortune fish that lived in your chest. How it just lay there, flipping and drowning.
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spell for fair weather Begin with a feather. Floated atop the breeze from the open door. The floor that creaks in just the right spot. The rot that settles into the joists and boards and soon, everything is a loss. Mildew creeping into your corners and eaves. Still, you'd have to leave to arrive home again. Every pinwheel set spinning in the yard, where the cats gather near the bushes and cry all night. Every summer, you lose it a little bit. The thread that floats above the trees, gets tangled in twinkle lights and power lines. The windows pitch black every time a storm rolled through and burned out your sockets. How you'd finger the keys in your pocket, but never unlock a thing.
spell for ex best friends The woman on the screen mixes greens in a $300 blender. Bends her body into animal shapes on the rug. Tugs her way into leggings and husbands and neat garages. The only way out was in, so you soldiered up. White dresses, white shoes. Blonded appropriately. The white, white suburb where you nested in the bell of a church. Who knew the hell of carpools, but you cozied up to men in play group. The gym. Anything that could wrap its arms around you was game. The body you oiled and papered, wrapped and plucked. Then tucked between 300 count sheets. Who knew the streets ended only in another lonely cul-de-sac, but you'd drive them for hours on end. Stuffing french fries by the fistful in your mouth to stop the screaming.
spell for the poets, who should know better Spring sticks at the back of your throat. Makes you woozy on ragweed and pollen. Bruises the back of your calf on the stairs. Bares all and nothing whatsoever that is useful. When writing the bones, be careful of the edges. When strumming the heart's sticky strings, be mindful of the hum. You say it, and becomes a million influenzas. Write it, and we know it as fact. The black in the backseat birthing all sorts of monsters you cleaned up and positioned as poems. Because it felt good. Because it felt like falling. All the wings that flickered, what you mistook for weather. Trick ponies and lonely cyclones. The poison you mistook for tea.
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spell for the wicked Blessed be the exes. Sex damp and wasted. Fastened into feathers and plump with whiskey. The sticky bar back with his twisted fingers. Double fisted archivists and mad chauffers. Real estate brokers and floaters. The grifter with his busted spine, a line of stitches sewn up the back of him and stuffed with rags we set fire to one by one over the city. Everything was burning sometimes, the building a block over that turned the sky black as a headache. You were so sick and so lovely when the ashes found you, settling over your dark coat. Floating over the river. The construction worker had no furniture, so you fucked on the floor. Harbored windswept spaces in all your cavities. The vending machine owner who bent you over the couch in his highrise. The city lit up outside like a circuit board.
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spell for sisters lost to water Forgive us our crooked teeth and weak ankles. A havoc of blackbirds. We were playing witches when the sky opened and out fell a perfect pearl. Before, all deadfalls into the river, but now, we swim. White eyed and gossamer through this story and the next. A little juniper oil and we could live inside the spell for months. Cats cradle and a single feather. The weather we expected always wetter than the weather we got. More thunderstruck and dumb luck. More give than take. Our mothers, the others who floated the forest, knock kneed and bad at math. The fathers that ate the world. The doll we placed in the tiny boat and floated her off. No one at all could save her.
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spell for the unhitched You'd have to be a witch to survive that water. After all, the dark lake you emerged from only a stand in for the sea. Your ring finger, a stand in for s noose. You were loose around the edges, so you broke open the sky and it was all gold leaf and demitasse cups. Carefully wrapped, but rotten pears. Your fear like a shriveled weed in the belly. The women were all choking on cotton. The bottoms of their feet just as filthy as yours. When night came for, what then? Sequined and spangled in your best pajamas. Someone who broke into the house and took your name for its own. Your open mouth for an oracle. Element by element filled you with metal til you rang like a bell. What then of your dangerous edges? The women who angled the bodies of their husbands in other directions. Other signs that appeared on your lawn. The dolls' forearm and a bucket of pig’s blood. What then of your mudded wanderings?
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spell for 9 am meetings The morning the coyote appeared on the lawn, you'd given up the ghost. The host of pincurls and pie tins. The thin lines cut through crossword puzzles. Imagine your surprise, the rabbit in its jaw, bleeding out on the grass. Those days, powder sugar sieved through endless rusty funnels. A dusty haze to the sky from the summer fires. But still, with coffee, you made it intact. The wondrous given over to stacks of envelopes and silence. The stapler you longed to yield through the plate class door. In the bathroom, gasping on the floor, the fear of burglars and wild animal attacks. The accountant that licked his fingers before sticking them inside you. How his wife was all tupperware parties and lost umbrellas. A panic that set your rabbit heart beating fast.
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spell for the discontented
Blessed be the broken ones. The open doorways that lead to black. Slack jawed, we waited for salvation in the form of a tiny god, a tiny mary nestled between our knees. Blessed be the forest, where we twisted ourselves around 100 year oak every night for weeks, burned sage and brushed out the cobwebs, but still the body took to men with wandering hands. With thundering wives in our inbox, the answering machine, where we shouted into the lake's dark mouth. Where we opened our thighs to the best intentions, clumsy and hobbling through morning streets. What price for the mice, rescued each morning from the trap, but to live and die another day. To find their way to poison. Apple or absinthe. Berries or bourbon. The witch who offered didn't care what you drank, only that you did. Only that you opened wide and swallowed.
spell for 2 am A little water. A little salt. A little further and you'd be halfway out of town, the road that falters to gravel if you go far enough. A little sage. A little page in your notebook full of incantations. A dozen novenas and a ripped paperback novel. Split tongued in the vestibule. Spilling into sticker covered bathrooms. The girls are always the nicest there. Offering compacts and tampax. Their witchery in the way their mouths pout in the mirror. Always the prettiest when you're drunk. Bent over the sink .A little lipstick. A little rose water in the bowl to soak your nails. Ragged and chipped. A little magic in the way you could balance a shot glass on your head for 5 minutes and no one could touch you. Their hands would slide right off.
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