dancing girl press, 2012
$7.00
limited edition of 50
Kristy Bowen is the author of several book, chapbook, and zine projects. She lives in Chicago, where she runs dancing girl press & studio.
from The Care and Feeding of Mermaids
Forget what you know about women. About circumference. No one really loves the travel as much as they love the traveler. The sound of the foot at the door. She’ll never have children, or bake, or know the constellations as well as you’d imagine. Her stories will keep you awake. How she and sister built castles from dixie cups and then obliterated them. How the water, the sky, was so blue it made her chest hurt. Forget what you know about memory. By day, she’ll work in an office and write poems at her desk. Hypnotize herself to the clicking of fingers moving over keys, the subtle fluorescent flickering. Will learn to move about as if swimming, or better, to pretend to swim while treading water. She won’t mention how she spends her lunch hour on the bathroom floor, tracing the grout with a finger nail and thinking about cities and structures. A perfect tower made of steel and concrete. How you could spend your whole life looking for the crack in the exterior and never even find it.
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