Welcome to National Poetry Month, 2016! We’re celebrating all month long. Each day we will bring you a poem we love–a selection from one of our published or forthcoming collections.
Today’s featured poet is Kristy Bowen, author of girl show. Her new collection, salvage, will be published in May.
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See here this circle I have created within the circle. The tiny blood dot within the white snow. Within the eye of the needle, within the eye within the I. My disease is a beautiful disease. Even my limbs grow smudged and soft at the slightest touch. My I within the eye makes a whistling sound that is a lot like the chamber inside the nautilus, a thickening near the anterior wall that swallows me down and down. Once inside, my disease swallows raspberries and flashlights and small, quick-hearted animals. Once inside my strangeness grows stranger still.
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A writer and visual artist, Kristy Bowen is the author of several book, chapbook and zine projects, including major characters in minor films (Sundress Publications, 2015), the shared properties of water and stars (Noctuary Press, 2013), and girl show (Black Lawrence Press, 2014). Her work has appeared most recently in Split Lip Review, Hound, and Whiskey Island. She lives in Chicago, where she runs dancing girl press & studio and spends much of her time writing, making papery things, and curating a chapbook series devoted to women authors. Her next full-length collection, salvage, is due out from Black Lawrence Press in 2016.