Heather Bowlan

 

Conversation with Rich: The Manufactured Woman

Conversation with Beatty:   Carnage

Conversation with Harjo:  Nightsong

Conversation with Cisneros:  Girltalk

Conversation with Notley:  Diamond


Conversation with Rich: The Manufactured Woman

I am an instrument
in the shape of a woman, a woman
in the shape of a monster, a monster in
the shape of a woman.  A thinking woman
sleeps with monsters.

You told me a language is a map
of our failures.  I wanted to choose
words that even you would have
to be changed by.  We are our words,
and black and bruised and blue.  To imagine
a time of silence, or few words, a time
of chemistry and music — the words
are purposes.  The words are maps.
Under our skins
we’re laughing.

I dreamed I called you
on the telephone and said:  We are,
I am, you are violent,
arcane, common, half-destroyed
instruments that once held to a course.
Our desiring does this, make
no mistake.  It is easy to forget
what I came for:  (a book of myths, a succession
of brief, amazing
movements) entering the poem
to find there how the lifeline, broken,
keeps its direction.

 


Conversation with Beatty:   Carnage

It’s hard, isn’t it:  the rolling and tearing
                                                velocity, spinning the body
            ocean-blue, a curl of the lip and a thousand times
                                    the gleam of the black
black goodbye.  I’m walking in the valley
                                                                        of a scar thinking
                        about moveable parts, the dead
                                                            world machine
in steamy back windows, there was a man
who scared the baby
                                    in you, blue girl.  Floating, now, and nothing can stop it —
                        slow swivel when you
                        whispered:  Have you found
                        a way to walk around
                        the world, have you found a way to negotiate
                        the pain?  A girl could surely get
lost in that
                                    raging foothold, that singular, brutal fire.
                        Fold yourself in&in, face
miraculous, I could choke on the body for a very
            long time — looking
                                                                        straight through to nothing, a long ride
                                                to warmth that never happens again.  Vanish,
search for
                        the pin of light, lines
                                                & questions, we start and end in lust.


Conversation with Harjo:  Nightsong

On a night like this
the stars who were created by words
bring us through the freezing —
the hours we counted precious —
when white ash covered blackbirds, I can’t
calculate the velocity of fear —
I dreamed my fiery body circling over
this house.  How to pray in the city?
We gather at the arrow light, the turning
of the worlds, we fly into the body
and we fly out:  a warring planet.
The northern cities.   The sea at night.  The earth
tips hungrily towards the sun, the only
gesture in the world.  We cannot escape
reckoning and the shore, the sweet
wind rattling burned with gunpowder, the river
where it fed into the lake, was a woman
who’d encountered a nightmare.  Do you know
how it is to hold onto anything in the dark?
It’s a palpable thing, the northern hemisphere
headed for winter.  It’s no simple thing.  No
story or song will translate the memory or
the fever or the terrible music, and no one
will ever forget the beauty of the red
leaf.  And so the stars spin
as if nothing ever happened
in the dark.


Conversation with Cisneros:  Girltalk

I could erupt sudden as
               a fist, a pomegranate, an ocean, roiled
and murmuring like a mouth. And after
               everything that’s breakable is broken,

                                a coup d’état of trumpets, a spider the color
               of a fingernail, the silence expensive, dull
                                and sharp.  There is much to learn, words that ignite
               of their own gas, that snap like bra
                                straps, that swell like cork, thick as foreign coins.

All night.  I’m waiting for a crescent of soap
               in a punched-tin sky.  I want to pull out the kitchen
knives.  You are my first allegiance, my seamed
               tongue, my blistered eye.  Your heart opened like

                                silk above a prison courtyard, an expensive
               geometry:  That mirror isn’t a yard sale.
                                It’s a fire.  And these are remnants of what
               could be carried out and saved.

In public or alone, I recognize the origami
               of the brain.  Sometimes, a woman needs
the ripcord, the crooked spin
               of horizon, the yank of life to bring her

                                back to earth.  This night I claimed as
               mine.  Listen — cars roar by. 


Conversation with Notley:  Diamond

This desert
with nothing between
me and it, I have
such an appetite —
we name us and then
we are lost, but if there’s delicacy
to be cultivated — malachite,
turquoise,
crystal — this is
a distinction, radical
contact, a scarlet cloth
torn.  Am I ready
for the world of you — a woman
stealing thistles:  I don’t
want to be alive is
a flame poppy alive I’m being
like that.  Who’s speaking?
— any poor matter’s
glee and grief? — I’ve
allowed burning
inside me — I choose
words, more words, the trees
make glass clicks, a seeing
that floats within
my bones, love, that
glow.  You gave me driftwood,
and you
gave me lapis — I don’t believe
your features are etched
in ice, you aren’t
you and I’m
not I — why aren’t we the
same as each other, the future
haunts this house.  Touch cold
words together and make
a sound, a tiny
red boxing glove — as if the past
solved anything rather
than caused it.
Airshaft — dark
window — a girl evaporates, I’m almost
terrified. 

 


Bio: Heather Bowlan is a student at the University of Pittsburgh.  Currently, in 2003, she is spending a semester abroad at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.


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