unusual creatures
kristy bowen
unusual creatures
image & text, Kristy Bowen October 2021 Based in Chicago, dancing girl press & studio creates a variety of open & limited edition books, art, and paper goods, as well as various ephemera-inspired gifts and accessories. The dancing girl press chapbook series was founded in 2004 to publish and promote the work of emerging women writers and artists. Spawned by the online zine wicked alice, the series seeks to publish work that bridges the gaps between schools and poetic techniques—work that's fresh, innovative, and exciting. The press has published numerous titles by emerging women poets in delectable open-run handmade editions. Our books are available via our website, at select independent bookstores, Chicago area literary events, and through author readings. www.dancinggirlpress.com editing & design: Kristy Bowen dancinggirlpress@yahoo.com
Dear Violet-At Greenbriar, the animals watch from the walls. Catch the light that filters across the dusty carpets. I wear a mask to cover my other mask. The lovers that quarrel in their gilt cages quiet when we cover them in blankets. By the time you read this, I will be a married woman. A merry mess. The ravens line up in the garden and I feed them their dinner. Grow thinner, but the child tucked beneath my ribs persists. I've grown so damp, the rot takes me room by room. The knots I've tied in the sheets every evening straighten by morning and hang from the line. My mind goes blank at the touch of a button. A flick of a switch. His fingers probe blindly when entering the room. Soon, the cats will nest in the hollow our bodies make in the bed. The space between the wall and the mattress where I've hidden the bejeweled rabbit I lifted from your bedside. She was so beautiful and broken, I didn't think you'd miss her.
Dear Violet-In the afternoons, I paint. Away from the walls, the land bends pleasingly into green. I've yet to find ghosts here. So much sun leaking into my corners. So much light I sometimes go blind. At night, George binds me to him with his arms, but by day, I roam the yard-- over the broken gate where we once discovered the dying fox in the elderberry bush. How you wrapped him your skirt and ferried him back to the house. We buried him in the garden, covered him with marigold petals and a rosary stolen from the maid. Laid him in a fruit crate til his fur shrunk in on itself. What elation we felt when his belly swelled and sagged in the sunlight. When his teeth bared and his eyes hardened into white.
Dear Violet-The days start with too much noise. A clatter of cutlery and the hiss of the kettle. Nettles in my tea and mice in the pantry. The workmen rattle the windows. Move in shadow on the afternoon floor. I've banished every ladder from the house. Every superstition, every lock of hair and moon of nail. The fortune teller in town looked at my hands and backed slowly away. Hooked the door behind me. My loneliness a ghost that moves between rooms and knocks pictures from walls. Where we eat our breakfast while death eats us from the inside. This strangeness that grows and swells and is so very tired.
Dear Violet-I keep forgetting things--the shopping, the laundry, my signature thin and unknown on the delivery box. Slowly the child sings to me and I to it. Tiny fox in a hen house. Tiny shoe, tiny spoon. Small objects line up to hide themselves from me at dawn and return each evening. I bury an egg beneath the porch for good fortune. The housekeeper hid it in her skirts all morning, slipped it to me beneath the table. All the night before, I help it coddled in my hands until the full moon. Slept with it in the drawer. Three times it took, with George smashing every one before I succeeded. My nightgown trailing the dirt of the garden in behind me, my filthy feet in the bed.
Dear Violet-I am afflicted. Discontent, headaches, the crows that line up on the balcony. All that waits for the misstep on the stairs, the salt in the soup. The loop of days winding itself around my ankles. The cats won't come near me now, but skitter off into the garden. Bring mice, broken on the step. Yesterday, George wiped the mechanical rabbit clean off the mantle. It purrs, jerks to life when I turn the gear, but its back legs are still. In the pantry, the box of rat poison I almost used as sugar, caught only at the last second. My mind, muddy as his boots, brackish as water in the bowl.
Dear Violet-The world tilts and darkens. Each night the moon thicker, large enough to swallow me whole. I lift my body from the settee and propel it through the study. Feed the body, swallow the morning tea. Follow it down the stairs and still it is not my own. Still the heart that beats a side rhythm, slightly off. The creatures in Father's cabinets are filled with moths. The closets filled with mothers. Just yesterday, I found another lurking in the cellar. She cried and made cooing noises, but I was unimpressed. Dressed myself in the twilight of her hair. Sharpened my bones on want. So many mothers and monsters in the fretwork. Mice in the oven. I've burned every love letter, and they hiss like something alive. Ashes, bone, paper. I pick up a pen and write.
Dear Violet-Mother was afraid of ghosts, but I am afraid of mother. She appears at night in the corner of the room, starving and moaning. Foaming at the mouth and in need of bread. I feed her and she grows fat on fear. Along the hallways, the dead line up, one by one, in their frames. I've taken to covering their eyes with the visage of animals. The baby dead from fever becomes an owl. Mother becomes a mare. Father, a stag. Our eyes flicker in the lamplight and all night long, we stare across the empty corridor. The horror of our feathers and fur glimmering, the click of our hooves on the stairs.
Dear Violet-In the clearing at night, the deer god stirs and moves, black footed, along the tree line. The woman who has come to quiet me reads me the cards before bed. The deer god looms in the shadow of her candle. Do you remember how much blood covered the grass when Father shot the giant stag? How his antlers glistened with it? The body like a wine skin and bloated. The fat that floated the stew. Who knew the body could unleash so much of itself on the frost covered ground, or that so much could come untethered in us, even now. This blood sack inside me that harbors a baby, a god, or the devil himself. The weight that bows my back and aches like a tooth meant only to bite.
Dear Violet-There are moths in the curtains. In the carpets. Moths inside the pheasant, glassy eyed in the study. I bumped a rabbit and a plume of them erupted from its belly. Moths in the bobcat. Moths in the ten-point buck. Tucked in among the linens we are always airing out. Sometimes I catch one with my eye before it disappears in the damask. Several hundred in the ottoman, stopped up in my lungs. I've tucked mothballs in all of our pockets, in the sockets of furniture. I go in and out of rooms filled with the dead. I fear the day they take us, a paper winged heaven. Even now, I open my mouth and the air fills with glistening gold.
Dear Violet-Before we eat dinner, we take turns counting the dead. Mother, father, the babies lost to fever and wind. Mount their heads on the wall and pray for their souls to slip through the world unnoticed. What's left alive, we eat with relish and candied beets. Stick our forks inside sinew and split open the bones. I've pried apart more corpses than I can carry. Father's dusty study filled with the most unusual creatures. The three-legged sparrow. One-eyed frog. The young doe that refused to split from its sibling, then hobbled through the forest, six-legged and blind. At night, I gather them to me like children, sleep with them under the bed. All night, they move about the room, mewling and gnawing through my dreams.
Dear Violet-Strange animals stalk my belly. At night, I turn in bed to quiet them, but they shift restlessly and cry out. Press their hooves against my spine and pine for wood and hollow. Are inconsolable when it thunders. The medicine man with his cabinet of wonders, every vial slick with liquid. Every swallow, one step closer to an empty house. A broken cage. The dark that gathers beneath my ribs thick with tongues and fur. The mink that slithers into my lungs, the mink that draped my mother's shawl. The howl of tiny wolves that are always famished, always lean and hungry and ready to bite.
Dear Violet-When the wind speaks, it speaks in tongues. In the slow thrum of butterfly wings beating in a jar. My voice takes on a tremor when I go out, the world a swirl of overcoats and meat gone rancid on the hooks. In every crooked storefront, the eyes following my slow gait. The buds woven into my plait of hair. They think I'm mad, but my madness descends a staircase, shines the best bone china and invites me in like a sister. Like a witness to the plates we smash, one by one, against the mantle. The forks we take turn plunging into the hearts of game hens. Then kindly pluck them out.
Dear VioletThe woods are lovely this time of year, dark and damp with moss. I cross the room, I return. Each candle burns unevenly, The child shifts in the belly. Winds itself in threads. The forest the reaches toward me, tiny tendrils, and I to it. Bit by bit, it takes the floor, the corners grown dark with green. The keen of birds, fat and frantic in the nest. We laud our best linens, but very soon, they are soaked in blood. Mud cakes the floor despite our best efforts to contain it. We feign surprise when an ash bursts through the bathtub drain, while mushrooms flourish beneath the bed. The set of bicuspids that ache in my mouth, long for flesh, red, on the plate. The fate of a thousand dinner forks is that we need only one knife. Sharp enough to cut deep at the root of everything before the rot sets in.
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