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Soon, the baby is full of bees. Bees in the bathtub, bees in the bassinet. Floating the surface of your coffee each morning without fail, tiny wings sticky with cream. Who can be a good mother amidst all this hum, the summer house thick with hives. The lives you’ve given up to get there. Every tiny shoe, every tiny spoon thick with honey. Who can be a good mother to a child of wax, even now softening in the sun?
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All night the baby won’t sleep. Moonlight seeps through the curtains and into the milk. Tell her a story and she goes silken in the crib. Unrolls and tumbles to the floor again and again. All night we feed her sugar and water and hope for the best. Place her in the dresser drawer for safe-keeping while the outside animals long to be inside animals, their tiny snouts nestling at our knees. The inside animals grow claws and teeth and keep hiding the baby in the pantry, where she cries all night until we rescue, always, at the last minute.
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We hide the baby when the lights go out. When bright light scatters the sky, down we go. Into the ground with our blankets and kettles, the metal of our chair legs scraping the concrete. Play patty cake with the ghosts in our cellar, red rover with the lovers losing their sweetness. How they hover provocatively over the washing machine, the cans of rotting fruit. Everything we saved for later gone bad with every season. The baby busts open a box of stale raisins while we sleep beneath a thousand mattresses piled one atop the other. Outside, the wind takes one house then another.
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By 7 o’clock, the ghost is knocking at the window. We fasten the locks and hide the matches, but something still smells like sulfur, the catch of a hundred tiny sticks bursting into flame. When we were children, we’d watch the boats roll in, one by one. Troll the breakwater looking wreckage, splintered bow, busted stern. Turn over in our beds, eyes shut tight. My mother was made of smoke, every Virginia slim catching her dress on fire while she waved from the dock mouthing, I love you. Come back. Sometimes we’d float for days and return starving to the kitchen where she would not recognize us for all the lake grass caught in our hair. The wateriness of our stare. Her ghost moving away from the house, while we cried, I love you. Come back.
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We take the baby to the doctor on Mondays. Place her in a box and poke holes in the top. Sometimes she sighs or coughs and we raise the lid to find her vanished and back in the crib. It’s hard to place who she takes after more. Me or the tree I rescued her from. Her father rowing his boat on the horizon indefinitely. The baby sometimes pops herself right over the side and into the deep, deep water. We fish her out with a giant net and place her back in the box where she sings til all the bees gather, a swarming cloud above us.
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A writer and book artist working in both text and image, Kristy Bowen is the author of a number of chapbook, zine, and artist book projects, as well as several full-length collections of poetry/prose/hybrid work, including SALVAGE (Black Lawrence Press, 2016) and MAJOR CHARACTERS IN MINOR FILMS (Sundress Publications, 2015). She lives in Chicago, where she runs dancing girl press & studio. She is the author of two forthcoming collections, LITTLE APOCALYPSE (Noctuary Press) and SEX & VIOLENCE (Black Lawrence Press).