URBAN CRYPTO ZOO LOGY
URBAN CYPTOZOOLOGY 101
Text/Image: Kristy Bowen Winter 2024 dancing girl press & studio
Week #1 November takes a bite out of my thigh, a tumble of tulle and sparkles stuck in my lungs. It was pretty the way all things collapsed into themselves. Blondes and bridegrooms and busted out windows. Hidden messages in the walls we kept trying to find. The mice were only bones and fluff by the time we got to them. Sad girl fall, and the men were all over us. In the shower, in the street, dropping their numbers in our coffee. I was trying not to cry, but the doors I kept closing one by one creaked slowly open. I’d try not to cough, but the monsters still lived under the house. Every once in a while, I’d get a flash of fur or claw and I’d be a goner. Would cancel all my plans to sit in my room and arrange my ghosts, pretty as dolls in a house.
Week #2 The summer of Mothman, I fall in love with invisible things. Write letters to the men who flickered in and out of vision for years. Blurry photos and 2am phone calls from faraway places. Their faces twist and list in the wind. Unless you can prove it doesn’t exist, I’ll throw everything into finding it. Packing granola bars and cyanide capsules in a pack that tuns into a bear that turns into a paper boat. I kept looking in graveyards and alleyways for a sign. A bit of fur or feather or finely knit cashmere, but I kept getting stuck in the fences. Wrenching my wrist and bleeding onto pavement. I carry home a rabbit with antlers, but the cats attack it nightly. Something wildish inside them that purrs and clicks in their throat like crunching bones.
Week #3 The coyotes eat the rabbits that eat the roses. Eat the small dogs of rich housewives and the cats that spring from 10th floor balconies we never believed would survive the fall. All summer, we clicked our tongues and mewled in the courtyard but nothing came. Nothing appeared hungry on the doorstep except the angry bartender with his wad of cash, his wandering hands. Land locked, I fucked him on a boat in the harbor no one could afford to berth in. Took him into my house, into the bed like a stray pet. Wedded him under a moon that blackened and howled from the sky. Cried over midnight tacos and flocks of pigeons that roosted and soiled every screen. The sheen of their feathers catching the wind where they ate the trash that ate the city that ate us bit by bit. Until we were nothing but shadows slipping between the buildings.
Week #4 My sister says all girls are either horse girls or dolphin girls and I believe her A cousin with a range of plastic ponies bedside. A grade school friend with Black Beauty posters slung about the room. Supposedly the best shampoo is Mane & Tale, available at the feed store, where my dad buys boots and tires while we languish in a sea of Suave, smelling like strawberries and covered in Lisa Frank stickers. I want to be a marine scientist, a sea witch, a soft cuttlefish thing. Want to be skinny and shiny-haired atop the back of some slick creature n a wash of blues and bright peach. Want to reach my arm into childhood and come back on the other side whole. Intact as the marshmallow moon that glows in a neon sky above the whales that glitter and flicker in holograph sunsets. Just once, round in my one piece, be the siren on the rocks. The locket containing only a voice, a note delivered in a bottle while the horse girls ride the back of painted stallions and disappear over the hill.
Week #5 At times, you’d never believe the things I carried home. Through turnstiles and train cars, in tote bags and crumbling cardboard boxes. The skulls of foxes and rabbits. Several pounds of blueberries. A single pigeon feather pressed in a book. The weather was terrible, so we huddled on street corners under seeping newspaper hats. Turned our hearts inside out for men who crashed against us like waves. The lake became the sea when it stormed. I was sorry when I lost the perfectly dead and perfectly intact dragonfly the size of my hand on the bus. Fussed over spilled coffee and longing. Brought home an extravagantly expensive bottle of bourbon. A poem. The water washed stone. Kept trying to throw myself at the sky, but I carried that too, dragging it by the hand through the city like a stranger I barely knew.
Week #6 Late July, and I catalog poems like lost pets. Hair wet from the shower and already sweating through my slip. Ripping cherries from the stem and stabbing a pen again and again into a notebook. One summer the trees were full of wasps, the windows full of spiders. I was beside myself with bus boys and rabbit catchers. The stretch of summer where we never knew what was coming. Tornadoes and water up to my ankles in the lobby of the building where I once fucked an ex in the stairwell. Where I collected cats and books and the dishes from the dead. The bed that harbored the ghost of my body pressed into the mattress on one side. I’d hide in the closet beneath the dresses swinging madly on hangers during the storms that slammed the lids of trash bins and bent the trees all in half, wild with wonder. Would lie down under the darkening sky and let it wash me into the lake that yawned and stretched into black.
Week #7 Midsummer and we barely move, linger like felines on couches and beds. Fling ourselves into cold showers and movie theater dark. You tell me later when we rounded the corner back into the city along the cemetery fence you realized all at once you were happy, Meanwhile, I was fending off the usual ghosts. The WWII pilot that climbed itself out of the lake and across the road to the gate. The terrified driver who would hit the brakes, send us crashing in a mangle of metal and broken bones. All phantoms that I harbor in my chest and their monsters. One could still eat me with one swipe of its claw. When I say I am happy, I mean I am terrified. Happiness, a fraught rope bridge over crocodiles. A fig filled with wasps. Something utterly beautiful and picturesque that can kill you nevertheless. You will literally lay down for it and let it devour you.
Week #8 I go out looking for the poem like some strange creature. Some scientist turned opera singer who can’t hit the right notes. Toting empty wine bottles and cages made of popsickle sticks snapped in half under a wild moon. Poetry loved me once, but now it barely calls. And when it does, it’s incoherent with all that static. Wracked with water and bitter with witticisms. You’d be hard pressed to find proof it existed at all. Stone turn and goldmine. Folding itself into the cracks of buildings. A flash of gilt and goblin. Black under the eyes and lying its way into nightclubs and other people’s beds. Poetry would cut your throat to save itself. Would purr and settle itself warm inside the bones.
Week #9 Under the layer of city is a layer of fur. Is a layer of rats moving swift through tunnels and funneling into the lake. Is a layer of concrete and Indian bones unfastened from the land, finger bone by finger bone. Their ghosts still wandering the beaches and the bedrooms of stockbrokers. The coyotes that skirt the park hunting rabbits and reals estate tycoons alike. Spiky-haired baristas and out of work actors. I once said nothing so bustling could ever be so haunted, but the ghosts own the fretwork, the rebar grid of streets. They bleed out the mouths and eyes of virgin statues and underpass shadows. Feed on bus boys and late-night cab drivers. Swallow them down into the dark mouth of the river that flows backwards through shipyards and steel mills and into history, rusted and blood thirsty.
Week #10 Over the years, I collect the city in my pockets. Lake rocks and pigeon feathers. Bottle tops and rubber bands. Tether myself to objects. Plump magnolias dropped every spring from a great height. Broken bits of headlight glittering at the curb. Once climbed up a set of subway stairs and into a canyon of sheetrock and busted radiators and clamed it as home. Roamed alleys looking for ghosts and hopeful omens. The roaches, fat and brown in bathroom stalls, where I’d cry on my lunch break over boys and wars and sick cats. This city stuffed with money that seeps out the seams of men stories above and floats down like wet confetti. That clogs our throats and comes back out as poems.