the bird artist | image & text by Kristy Bowen

the bird artist | Kristy Bowen

the bird artist

text & image by Kristy Bowen

dancing girl press & studio, 2021

the bird artist

i.

At first, we sat down for dinner at seven.

Our own little heaven filled with tea cakes and waterfowl.

The best china from the best places. My grandmother's linens

brought over on a sunken ship and tucked beneath her coat while others drowned around her. They still smelled like the sea when the wind was right, blowing on the line. Still harbored her fear,

damply rowing toward a distant shore. I would lie them out on the bed and live inside them for awhile in the afternoons, while the flies flicked at the window screens and the children played in the tub.

Each spot, so carefully rubbed out, but so much death woven into cotton, the taper of lace. At night, it would undo us, send us falling through sheets of white and into dark water. No matter how much we washed them,

they'd get caught in our throats. The boats too far off in the distance to save us.

ii.

Begin with screws and wires. The song is in the slide of metal gears, the whisper of friction where the song lives, deep in the belly of the beast.

Out east, we slept through winter, feeling out the dark, coldest corners

of the house in the middle of the night. My sister swallowed a bird that eventually killed her. Willed her onto mountainsides and train tracks.

No one could wrest it from her throat, though we tried. Plied her with honey

and milk and still, she whimpered all night beneath the covers. Her lovers slipping in and out the window. If you tighten the gears, you can approximate singing but only to the untrained ear. After all, we were listening to the wrong

animal, the wrong music. By June, everything rusted over and out of tune.

iii.

At dawn, my husband takes out the birds. Puts them to bed.

When we wed, a percussion of wings in the courtyard, but now, they sputter and rust from the damp. Clutter the tops of cabinets,

the kitchen pantry. I find one, one morning, tangled in my hair.

Small, leaking oil in my palm. Crushed in the hush of sheets and blankets we pulled back and forth between us all night.

How to account for such broken things, this wedded life.

The knife we put to love each evening, then took away.

The bride cake and its frosting teeming with ants at the reception.

Spoiled in all that sun.

iv.

One morning, they drag the river for the woman whose husband may have killed her. The children still in their beds come sun-up.

Come swallow song. The small shoes they clamored into

and out onto the lawn. The fawns that wandered through the fence were shot the summer before, blood everywhere. Even in our ears as they cried. The children clutching blankets and bears, bleary-eyed

and blinking. The birds outside were so bright that day they could have been angels, godless, flailing. Could have been shadows, spotting the retina, Could have been our own hearts, thrumming in our chests.

Diving blindly toward the windows.

v.

You can pluck out the heart and replace it with ash. The thrashing of wings and feathers lasts only a second. Wire-tongued, stuffed with newsprint, it almost seems like a real living bird.

A real living girl. Or the one made of wood, poised outside the pharmacy.

Her ornate box. How she could tell your fortune for a dime, spit out between her lips. Nothing below her hips but a deep cavern filled with coins

and paper. Nothing beneath her dress but spookiness and nesting sparrows.

You can pluck the song out and replace it with static, like a radio signal coming far across the valley and down into our mouths. The houses

we burned to find the one with just the right amount echo. The men whose hands forced open our throats and planted the seed.

You will go on a long voyage. You will find love when you least expect it.

Ask again later.

vi.

In the afternoon, we empty the cages. It's all seed and shit, but the feathers are so soft between my fingers. The bones so fragile as I set them in teacups one by one. What fun when we'd chase them through the house,

the top of the drapes where they'd wait. Once, my mother opened a window and a pair of finches went missing for days, turned up in a town hours away.

Who can say what distances we travel while everyone else sleeps in the house.

How many times I carried them to the garden and begged them to go. But every morning, hungry on the ledge. They'd roll over and over in the dirt. Sip the tiny bits of water in a bowl. I'd wrap the cages carefully in towels at dusk and they'd quiet,

but still I could hear them cooing in the dark. The world circumscribed by need and the trees so far from the house We could never imagine making it there before night or the hunters got us.

Our hearts stopped, so tiny in our chests.

vii.

In dreams, the hunter comes at dawn, dragging a rifle across the grass.

A trail of blood and a pheasant fat with maggots. Eggs shake on a high shelf. The selves we thought to invent grow dodgy

with spoiled milk and infants at both teats. The hunter that eats his way through pantries and icebox, through bedroom sets and lace underthings.

Frightens the cat who, one day, eats her stillborn kitten down to bones.

So much birthing and dying overnight, it makes us mad. Frothing over tea and speaking in tongues. Dead things everywhere, even in our boots.

Red in my hair, my mouth, my hands where I hold the babies

in the river to save their souls from their father's boots. From the stench of rotted deer that emanates from his throat night after night. The wheezing sound that precedes his waking and roaming hands. The silence that places a palm

around my throat and squeezes til it all goes black.

viii.

Eventually, I learn to tighten the screws with minimal damage.

The breakfast oranges, the daylilies from the garden, all rife with success. The way the babies always fat and their accoutrements

bleach white in the sun. For fun, we cover them in blankets. They’re always surprised at the game. They squeal with delight at everything. The deer.

The foxes sniffing round the porch. The tiny metal cuckoo

in the box with the broken spring. They finger its gears and smash it on the table but still nothing comes from it--no movement, no sound. It's dead the way all shiny things die eventually from disuse. The way all things

slow through the afternoon, songless by nightfall. The cuckoo jerks sometimes and comes to life, but only if you crush it in your palm. The babies crying and the kitchen filthy. Their lids only flutter only when we whisper hush.

ix.

The first bird was, by far, the best bird. The tiny clicking of gears, bright-eyed and warbling. In the workshop, a miracle that set the heart into panic, the frantic beat of its wings. The children oohed and ahhed,

while the creature banged again into the ceiling. Dropped to the floor.

Took turns fetching it from the corners. The sink. Underneath the divan. Still humming and chirping. The second bird wouldn't fly, though we oiled its wings and whispered

sweet nothings. It sputtered on the table and fell into the trash. The third was a monster, hooked beak and ragged claw. Black as the back of the closet where the children hid it to frighten each other. Not even mothering could save it, terrible thing.

I buried when it nearly took one of their eyes. But it kept rising up through the dirt, clogged with earth and leaves, Barely moving, it would croak all night from the garden, spite-filled and seething.

x.

The cellar, by now, is damp with rot. Plump with insects skittering beyond the lamp.

We frighten them as much as they frighten us. How we tighten our spines and descend. The hem of our nightgowns dragging the dirt.

First, the daughters. Then the sons. We play backgammon in the gloom, where there's barely room among the discarded trunks and broken chairs.

The selves we cast off every spring, every dress tightening our middles.

Little shoes. Little bonnet.

How we lost it, then found it, covered in dust. The doll was an argument, so they cut her in half with kitchen scissors. Smashed the train on its tiny track. Burned the ears off the velvet rabbit. How we squeezed ourselves into our old life, topside,

but left part of us in the shadows, How you'd catch the girls laughing in the corner and the boys mumbling in their beds. The ghosts we brought back with us.

We frighten us as much as we frighten them.

x.

The man who sells magazines has the largest hands I've ever seen.

Keeps licking his fingers, fondling the pages. His tongue darts out, then back in and my knees ache with spring. With the hinges in my haunches,

the feathers in my lungs. The whipoorwill spins on its weathervane in every direction. What is desire, but a soft turning of every gear in the body? The wrought interior, where the prism shatters with sun.

What is want, but a fistful of pennies in the mouth? A slap, a kiss.

The cabinet where the shelves are always empty. How do we determine the border between lovers, the levers that twitch and release?

The space behind the garden shed where my head bent against the paint and left a mark. The hand prints on my thighs and the bluebells in my hair. The ticking of the metronome

inside the heart that pulls the wire that shakes the rattle that breaks the glass again and again.

xi..

In the beginning, there was scarcely space for birds or children or even love.

The ghosts took up too much room, walking the floors and knocking into tables. We'd take turns opening our mouths and the devils

would fly out single file. The doubt we harbored in the belly, so far down, but the doubt persisted. As children, my sister and I would whisper between us in the bed. Draw sticks from each other's closed fists. This one,

the man with the magnificent house. This one the penniless artist.

The babies, fat-cheeked in the bassinet. Cupboard full of dresses and a kitchen full of cakes. But the body would scarce produce.

Sheeted in the attic, dusty as a field. The woman with the crystal ball and the son with a limp held my hand in the dark and forecasted a passel of squalling infants.

Sill, when they arrived, a surprise, each one. Plucked from the wraiths

the cellar. Each one prettier, but far angrier than the last.

xii.

In summer, my lover brings me things. Pigeon feather, moonstone, silver locket. Once a stolen pie from the baker, fat with cherries and way too sweet. I make him a water whistle shaped like a warbler

from wood, then hide it carefully in my skirts. But nothing good can come of afternoon, sun sticky and damp with breath. Death so close we could still smell it, wafting from the tanning room. Creeping up from the kitchen.

I'd undo my dress and underneath, the marks on my body make him cry. The belt, the broom, the back of hand. All written exquisite on the skin. The thin membrane between my hand and thumb, a burn I rub salve into

but it never seems to heal. The warbler presses into my hip as he takes me rough on the carpet. Over the chaise lounge. It warps in the humidity and won't sing a single note. Only black water in its craw, where no good can come of night.

xiii.

The women in the garden hide knives in their smiles, stones in their pockets.

After lunch, rip each other limb from limb, sugar in the sockets, but poison in their mouth. This one, a wayward husband,

the mute daughter and wandering dog. Another, the barren womb.

The tether that won't hold. She’d soap in her insides nightly, Rub until she's red. The bed he placed inside her, where nothing

quickens, nothing licks the loins like the boy in her youth, Fists full of wildflowers.

All the spirits gathering nightly, but nothing in the belly but feathers and dirt. What hurt in his stare where the blood blooms

cleanly between her legs. What hope, the way she sings softly, knitting the smallest things for the tiniest children that slip out of her in the night. The red sheets on every line.

xiv.

If you carefully replace the tongue with wire, the song goes first.

The articulation of muscle to roof of mouth. The sack of breath exhaled as silence. What violence we hold between our ribs

in the cavern of the belly. What deadly lack. Slack jawed and starving. The women gather in the foyer to mourn the broken bodies, to finger the linens wrapped so carefully

around the infants too small to survive. A hive of voices escaping the windows, spreading down the street. One woman with three daughters in the grave. Another, building limb by limb

even now. Had they lived, what voice could she have given them, what tiny tongue in their mouths. What wings, what wind could hold open everything inside them, long enough for their first breath.

xv.

The doctor saw fit to repair the wings, but the song was still off.

The limbs wrapped in lavender water, the steady wander of his hands.

The laundered dresses we kept throwing to the wolves.

Who can sleep amid such racket. Every feathered thing shaking in the cages. Each page torn from the book we wrote our fears down in. Fever. Fire. Flood.

The bones we bent around our lives to save the eggs, so fragile in the nest. The rest of it drone and hum, the wind that rattled the windows and threatened to take us.

The breaking we longed for, split-tongued and singing.

The bones break easier than you'd think. Tiny slivers in our clothes, in our hair. The precise moment we snapped the morning in half and left it thrashing on the table. What riot when the creatures

flew round the room,lit atop the curtains and screamed. What love we bound their limbs with. Above the kitchen, they lived for months, not needing us. Feeding on flies and mosquitoes.

Their hearts beating mechanically with little clicks. With a flick of the dial, they'd swoop round and round the room, crashing into lamps and pianos. Stunned and wide-eyed,

littering the carpet where we'd roll them in towels and sing them to sleep.