Kristy Bowen the paper house At the edge of the field, we see the angriest bodies. The spell is in the wrists. The spell, in the shampoo. Girls with long throats and a penchant for divining rods. In the end, the house burns beneath the moon openinglike a mouth torn out of a book. All our rooms have wants, our wants, broken doors. We smolder beneath dresses. Our buttons, our brocade dark. Even now, the mice shred newspapers in attics filled with cages ripped from hooks in parlor walls.In parlors ripped from a woman's skin, all eyelets and hooks. At the edge of the field, we watched with matches in our skirts. instabilities All along, we'd thought we were in love with weather. Azaleas blooming inky against the fence and all the porch lights loosening. Women named Alice or Ingrid smoke in clamorous rooms with long windows, their spines opening to back roads and folksongs. We had thought ourselves in love with thirst, whether or not the sky opened and showed us its teeth. We dreamt of beheadings and antebellum skirts, power lines crossing and recrossing the atmosphere, frenzied as the letters of our names. sarah leaves the midwest Never the black water rippling, or the road signs bent by wind. Not the anchors, or the underpass, or the bridges we call lapses. Seldom the difficult swimming. Canals dragged for bodies every spring. Or tentative gravel parking lots, tires filled with paper wasps. Not the splinters in her mouth, or the spangles in her hair, blue as the inside of the virgin. Rarely what we call interruption, neighborhood dogs in their dusty ghetto, their wilderness of bed sheets. Scarcely the stained saucers and rusted spoons, or this block, and all the houses catching fire. Never again the emptied dresses, frozen to the grass, or cavities in her teeth, humming. entropy The night the windows all crash in their frames, I'm not the shambled aftermath or the boy-girl order. Spaces between us are not spaces at all but a thousand blue flowered nightgowns. You haven't yet learned to discern the shape fo things according to your tongue. Heavy cumulous hang the sky like sheets from a line and entire alphabets go missing. In the dark, a woman's teeth flicker on and off. We'll decide who's leaving by scientific method and the rule of light bulbs and iceboxes. My skin allows enough lumen for boxwoods to glow. about Kristy Bowen