HOME IMPROVEMENTS | Kristy Bowen

HOME IMPROVEMENTS Kristy Bowen

HOME IMPROVEMENTS

image & text Kristy Bowen

HOME IMPROVEMENTS Kristy Bowen dancing girl press & studio, 2024

how to live with ghosts I put death in the room and firmly shut the door. Listen for the click of the lock, the slide of the pinions carefully into place.

Who knows how many rooms in this house we’ve left untouched now, dust gathering over dresser tops and coverlets. Daylight streaking the windows. How many dead parents rattle in their beds, roll into each other in the night. Their bones make a racket, a pocket of silence I carry up the stairs, then retreat. We feed them soup and bread, but still they remain underfed, scratching

at the carpets and moaning. By morning, they number thousands, rumble in the rafters.

Could lift the house right off us. A murmuration shaped like a hand or a dove. They are beyond love, floating over the field. Some dark frenzied thing we keep in our chest. The best of the dishes smashed in the dark. The rest we tucked inside rotting cabinets for safekeeping as the house groaned and leaned with the weight of all those wings.

tips for cleaning almost anything You begin with baking soda and vinegar.

Stiff cotton sheets, hung and bleached and slack with grief. After all, what ruin in the body, what waste. We shuttle back and forth between the rooms decked in chintz couch covers and long draws of whiskey.

Tipsy with tea sets and open windows.

There were never enough hangers, so we laid out the best on the lawn. Yawned into the landscape.

Loaded coats into boxes filled with mice and other detritus. Carried as much as we can for as long as we could. Birthday parties

and punch bowls shaped like swans.

Empty picture frames and notebooks filled with numbers. We lumbered over crates stacked with glass animals. It was so final.

The collected and the discarded. The moon we cast our spells to and goodbyes, slipping like deer through the yard.

how to build a smaller house inside your house For every dirty dishrag slung over the lip of the counter, twenty empty toilet paper rolls.

Ten porcelain cats. The baseball bat hidden next to the bed for intruders. The delusion of the good towels, faded and stained with the blood from the night I gashed my head on the furnace grate after too much wine.

I didn’t know what to grab, so I grabbed everything to stop the creep of red down my cheek.

Bandages and barrettes and expired Pepto Bismol.

Wiped my hand against the door and the mark was still there in the morning and stayed for weeks.

There were too many blankets in the cupboard, so we made a fort of them in the living room.

Fastened the corners to anything that wouldn’t fall over.

Fought our way through boardgames and breakfasts and uninvited houseguests. They’d tidy the wreckage while we bled and bled.

how to care for the monster under your bed The devil lives in the wooden door, eyes and mouth and pointed ears.

The fears you tuck beneath the covers and tend to every night like a church.

We came with torches and knives, but soon we learned to live with it, the doom spreading the limbs like a map. That was the trap, how beautiful it all was,. sleep and the way the sky turned before the storms that threatened to lift us right off the foundation.

Learned to lean into darkness and crooked fingers strumming the heart.

The sweet, heated places we thought were godless and yet so full of angry, horny gods. All the maidens that were interchangeable, this one a deer, this one a cow. What now to do with their perfectly smooth bodies but feed them to the creature that thrums beneath the labyrinth of houses and cul-de-sacs.

Who eats and eats but is never full.

how to purge your closet full of bones At least they were mostly yours. Rib bone, shin bone. The bend of your clavicle.

The finger you dragged down the wall to reveal you were so tall now. The crayon marks scribbled with your name. So tall you barely fit between winter boots and a box of photo albums, but fit you did.

Marvelously gnawing through snickers bars and flat cans of Pepsi hidden behind the boardgames. A girl could easily lose a femur to the beasts that lived in the woods, so you kept them close. Kissed them nightly

on the nose. Filed down the teeth that nibbled at your fingers till you could barely feel the bite.

Still, at night, they’d carry away your jaw or a single toe. Nothing ever fit back the way it came. You’d wander the house and find your father’s ribcage, the lungs that failed him so completely. Your mother’s heart carved open in box. The fox that curled around your ankles and took your breath with his rage.

how to work around the bodies in all the walls Start small. The woman in the pantry leaves footprints through the flour.

Handprints on the window you can’t clean, Can’t even touch without ringing in your ears.

The man on the stairwell who grabs your ass on the way up. The baby crying in the bottom drawer of the dresser.

If you want to open the fridge, you have to move the bedraggled family of four who crouches in the corner.

They wail all night. Throw spatulas and slotted spoons against cupboards

and eat all the butter. The tall man in the shower. The starlet in your bed.

There’s a woman under the sycamore tree who stares and stares at the man on the porch with a rifle. It’s so loud sometimes, their fighting. The way they chorus before dawn and lie down for the day.

The child in the thicket covered in berries or blood, who knew which? The girl in the mirror, circles under her eyes that may have been you, may have been a ghost. How she looks through and through.

the art of repair If you find a door into the house, I can find the key. Find the fear that settles in the knees and sparks against the stove that simmers and hisses.

The thin scent of gas that pervades every room like a trace. The grace with which we lie down in the garden, sun-soaked, grief-throated.

All of the dishes were dirty, riddled with spots and crusted over, so I fussed in the cellar and delivered our grandmother’s china, bone white with disuse, every gold rim singing under a finger. But the tune was off, like it was

traveling over frightful distances.

How I nicked my wrist on the broken edge of a teacup, a smashed saucer. Everything rattling in the boxes stacked in the garage.

Angry with all the years tumbling inside.

Their contents that spill out on the driveway. Where my father once emptied a suitcase looking for a snake we imagined was there but was not.

Dresses and books and mismatched shoes littered across the grass.

pest-control for the broken hearted Down the hall, the cats grow restless in a room filled with floral dresses and indiscretion. The bits of a life, photographs and unused stamps and busted luggage we crawl into at night. Where do we put the broken window we crashed through.

Or the Christmas tree that smashed to the floor one December night, scattering ornaments and tinsel we didn’t clean up until spring. How to pack everything we’d need when we didn’t know where we were going except that we could take everything or nothing at all.

Could open our mouths and holler down the corridors that wound back to the same exact location in every single house.

The same mouse whose heart we tried to stop with poison and traps is the same mouse that hides in the lobby of the heart.

That chews its way in and through.

decluttering the body Take the ghosts and put them back in the body.

Hide them in the limbs and tongues and behind the spine that trembles every once in a while to make sure you’re paying attention.

The internet says Do not hold. Do not hold the trauma like a fetus or a cancer in the body.

Do not safe harbor it in your stomach, but let it wash out in the shower. Let it roll down your skin. No trauma in the body but in the drama of hospitals and held breath.

We found death and took him home, tucked him in at the corners. Shut the door firmly but he keeps

getting out. I went looking for sadness beneath my sternum, under my tongue.

Caught him playing cards at the back of my cerebellum, betting the whole house.

how to be pretty and also haunted When we look for Monday we find only rotted boards and slotted spoons.

By noon, have written our names on all the objects and it rubs right off.

The tub I sank into the first night in the house, only nine and caked with dirt from the hill we’d clamor up and down all summer.

There were no lights, so we carted candles and lanterns through the field in our pajamas.

What newness in the sheets and freshly laid carpets we barely stepped on, the carefully placed walls leaning against each other like cards. The orange cat

who kept escaping out the door and into the forest where we’d give chase, shedding talcum and crackers we’d offer up to the gods, one by one. The beds we tumbled into that swallowed us in cotton and butterflies.

fire alarms and other family games We put the family in the house and watch the parts move. The father goes to work and the mother clicks in the kitchen, glitches over dishes and vacuums. Frenzies over jello molds and lace aprons. The daughter rolls over in her bed while the dogs bark and bark and the cakes rise and pretty soon a decade passes.

One, then two, then three. The rooms grow smaller around them. They make coffee and sigh, then begin to dismantle the house with their hands and teeth.

The rabbit wallpaper border, the yard and its wooden fence.

Chew through attic beams and dryer sheets.

Empty pill bottles and boxes of dolls.

The misshapen toys melt together in a fire

no one smells or sees. But you can feel it in the walls sometimes. The flicker that lights the stove we keep throwing the bones into to see if they would burn.

10 desserts to die for Moss grows over the floors and over the beds.

Over wedding photos and tri-state ribbons and soon over the girls in cinnamon lip gloss.

Over the bathroom sink where they shed their skin and hair and years like animal things.

They’re so skinny, you can’t see them anymore.

The ground open ups and eats them daily, spits out their small bones and reassembles them before school in clean pressed linen.

Hard to find the cracks in their carefully powdered skin, the weak spots where they double over at the waist. Where they taste sweets

at the mall and throw up in dirty bathroom stalls.

And such good girls, such clean teeth rotting out of their skulls. Such pretty things that smell like decay if you lean close, death in all their holes.

the somnambulist’s guide to cooking When I lie, I lie just a little. A drizzle of frosting on an already stale cake.

Rolled in coconut flakes and powdered sugar that settles like dust on our hands.

On the table, across the living room carpet.

The truth aches like a tooth too long beneath the gums, a hum in the cortex where the kitchen fades from view and reassembles in pieces. Here, a chair leg.

Half of a toaster. A loaf pan full of blood.

The flood that took the sink and the cabinets and left the floorboards warped and creaking.

How I was always sneaking to the fridge in the middle of the night, the telltale boards that gave me away. So ravenous and dark I couldn’t see. So plump with rage and spite I couldn’t fit any more inside.

methods of deconstruction What we carry, we carry in pieces. In fragments of sheet rock and stardust and two-by fours.

The floor we thought was solid fell clean through.

The birds that flew inexplicably into the house when no one was looking. Nested in the windows and pushed out the past with their song. I was wrong when I said a house is a labyrinth, a cage of sorrow. That we get trapped in its ribs and struts and it delivers us howling.

What I meant was the house was not a body, but a tomb that breathed. The body too, a tomb, and what we did with it. Moving through the world

with all that death fastened to our backs. The cracks in the foundation we pretended not to notice.

The float of trees that fell one, then another, in the yard, too weighty with rot to stand.

Too wet with autumn. They fall and fall.

a place for everything and everything in place Soon, all the houses are filled with sorrow.

Sorrow grows on walls and creeps up the stairs Clogs the bathtubs and ruins the wallpaper.

Sorrow rises like smoke from the bones we left smoldering too long on the grill and now it settled in our noses. In our throats and makes new monsters among the bric-a-brac of memoires.

Burns out the bulbs for miles. What to do with all that sorrow but pull it like a blanket, up and over our heads in midnight beds. Get it spoons and forks and cups of tea. How it was always hungry, but now it devours the buttons on my dress, the last of the aspirin. Wants to eat at the strangest hours, pulling us from sleep and eager at the table.

how to fold a fitted sheet Darling, the moon is cold tonight. Unhinged.

Flinging polaroids into the well. The hell we go into willingly. The underworld of branches where I hold my ghosts, all lined up.

One, then another. Their bodies, their hands inside me. Rearranging the walls and pushing the bed across the room. I tried to love them, tried to break myself with beauty, but now their boots clutter the attic, leave marks on my throat.

At night you can see them move behind my eyes like the windows of a house. I’ll vanish and return by sun-up. You’ll scarce know I’m gone, except for the mud on my heels and the blankets tangled at the foot of the bed. How I’d wrangle

them up and down the stairs, then kiss them sweetly before hanging them. Single file, from the rafters. The next night they’d return and spend all night pulling us under the bed by our feet.

the mad gardener’s guide to springtime planting Spring lumbers into the midwest Bell-footed and rhapsodic. The floods we thought were storms.

The storms we thought were idling trucks on the highway.

The dead we thought we buried up to their waists in peat moss and dirty sticks. How we’d sing for them come March, the bulbs we planted the year before reaching pale fingers up through the soil. Spoiled by fungus, by rabbits. By the decay I place in my mouth and spit out like a penny. The tea I circle round and round in my cup.

Madly fastening every latch in the house. The haunts we clung to, hatched bloody and incandescent in the bowl.

The howl of wind as it took each letter from my fingers and fed it to the earth. That earth that opened a wide, dirty mouth and yawned.

what to feed your dead, dead flowers All my best stories begin with the dead. Fed on milk and sugar, they clamor up the stairs then down.

Blow out birthday candles and stand in the corner of photos. They’re quiet until they’re not.

Throwing rage fits in the supermarket and fucking up truck stop bathrooms. Nice until they’re not, sliding beneath the covers and wrapping their hands around my throat. The ghosts you thought you left in abandoned places get bored with counting penny tiles and cracks on the ceiling.

Spend their time ripping the wallpaper into shreds and setting them on fire. It smolders like

everything too damp to burn, too much mold beneath the mattresses. Too much rust in the water, bloodlust and breath. Gorgeous, until they’re not.

how to rid your house of strays Soon all the houses are filled with small animals.

Woodchuck, sparrow, a half a dozen mallard ducks.

In the tub, the fox we thought was a mirage one morning over coffee. They nest in the rafters and breed in the cupboard. Doves and squirrels and 100 tiny snakes. Beetles and frogs the size of a fist.

We thought we could fake our happiness, feed it chinese food and blueberry cake and it would go away.

Death and all its cages. Laid the groundwork for warrens full of rabbits that froze sticky to their cages in the winter.

The glimmer of their eyes frosted over. The hamster we accidently let starve in the attic. The things

we killed with poisons and traps. The cats, they birthed millions in the bushes. We kept picking them up and putting them back in a basket mewling.

But who knows how many got away?

hunger and longing in the midwest In the attic, I hide the girl with the mouth that swallows everything. Who wallows in beds with strangers and books and makes a mess of the curtains with her crying. Hides the spoons in her underwear drawer, popsicle sticks between the baseboards and the walls. Ate everything if you left her alone too long. She’s ravenous, which is to say she’s dying slowly of love.

Of angora sweaters and crooked mittens between her teeth. Of cigarette ashes collecting in her shoes. She’s dying the way all sweet things do.

Hollowing out, like a husk. The truck she climbs into at midnight, the same truck that burned three town over. The same yearning for flooded

ditches and witchcraft and longing the size of the sky itself. She’d collect it her arms and up the ladder she’d go.

And then down and down and down.

housecleaning for the apocalypse All the women who live in my bed make the same noise. The same mouths.

Open and close. Frozen in desire, they lay themselves out in a row, the bowls of their hips birthing monsters of memories.

Plucking out their tongues and setting them squalling in the center of the yard.. They keep falling in love with river and wind. The hush of midnights, this goddamned brushfire of a town.

If I had known they would rattle the cage doors at night, I would have set them free. Would have let them flee to the woods and its frozen dark.

The stairwells keep collapsing into nothing.

Rusting through the bottoms. The sofas

ugly and sodden with water we float down the hall.

Every doorway slammed shut, tight as a grave.

What a fright how the doors howl all night.

How we forget to be afraid of what comes through them. What goes out.

Poems in this project have appeared previously in Marrow Magazine and Sweet Tree Review.