BURNING HOUSE PRESS

dark things under her tongue

by Kristy Bowen

In the graveyard, all the ladies line up tidy in rows. Babies and boat accidents and bad husbands. Braid each other’s hair in the grave while their fingers turn black with mold and the mice play in the space between their ribs.  Would root through the skull looking for memories or dreams or stormy portents. She was too pretty to be dead, but too dead to be pretty. Hands folded over the lace they wrapped her soundly in and sent her to bed. Wed her to monsters and moldering flesh. Tethered her limbs to the coffin like they were wrapping a Christmas goose. All her teeth loosening in her jaw, mouth sewn up, and blood in her eye. Hyacinths in her hair, in her hands, pinned to her lapel. 

The banker once burrowed his face against her throat. Opened her body like a trinket box and jangled. Wrangled and robbed with the best of them, a pistol in his pant leg. A fistful of cash   The gash he left on her forehead an omen. The broken arm, the bruised thigh. All an opening into dark that she followed like a rope, the terrible singing of dish rims and boiling water she’d plunge her hands into each night and watch her skin turn pink. 

When they buried her, the banker cried and thrashed against the bed. Crawled beneath it feeling out the dark with his fingers. The monsters ravenous with wind and cloven hooves. Their fur matted and woven with blossoms and blood.

Kristy Bowen lives and writes in Chicago, where she creates dark poem-ish things, lyric essays, hybrid fiction, and  design/decor/diy content for various websites and publications.  She is the author of numerous books, chapbooks, zines, and artists books, including a recent collection of poems, WILD(ISH).  For the past two decades, she’s blogged about writing, art, horror films, thrifting, and other miscellany at DULCETLY: NOTES ON A BOOKISH LIFE. Raised in the wilds of northern Illinois, she currently inhabits a beautiful, but drafty, art deco building near the lake with her cats, her husband, too many books, and a vast collection of thrifted finds–only some of which are haunted.