From Dusie

BRIDLE

I’m frayed, favored— a woman tangled in the clotheslines, her blue dress dragged across three counties. My belly, blood dark, and you with your made-up name, pressing your fingers against me like a bell. Debris gathers on the porch where we separate the yolks from eggs like villains, two girls in a movie about the devil. All sorts of monsters in the machinery, waiting with their blades and red hair. My letters to you are small, quartered and hidden beneath the floorboards. This grid of fields inhabited by rusted mailboxes, pretty spinsters; when the salesman comes from Wichita, when the horses have all run off, I will speak to you in my milk voice, knowing all the right words.

© Kristy Bowen 2006