Tag: kelly boyker

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Kelly Boyker’s “The Crab-Toed Tribe”

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The Crab-Toed Tribe

In the Western part of New York State dwells a community of crab-toed people
whose peculiar affliction has puzzled scientists. The hands and feet of this group
of people resemble the claws of a crab or a lobster.
                  – Robert Ripley – 1929

In the family portrait above the mantel
the men stand with their arms behind them,
the woman sit with their claws folded in their laps.
Just beyond our grim smiles, seahorses
are visible in the wallpaper.
At night the sky is cleaved with meteorites.

It comes with the X chromosome,
can wait tick-like for generations,
then suddenly the womb is bleeding, the mother torn.
Now there are procedures to close the claws
in vitro with rubber bands. Sometimes the child survives,
other times it emerges blue-gilled as the noon-time special
past its pull-date.
gasping on the plate.

Each birth is a thimble-sized incident,
easily erased, accounting for rumors of bubbling vats
and parts secured with twine.

We open our mouths and form bubbles,
push ourselves forward, and
tap the glass with banded claws.
We want so much to be taken home,
want so much the wanting becomes an exoskeleton
picked clean as a wishbone, waiting for the breaking,
existing only in the slender space between beauty and toxicity.

Whatever held us together has been removed,
all loose parts: thorax, claws, tail, mandibles,
the astonishing devastation.

 

“The Crab-Toed Tribe” appeared in Kelly Boyker’s book, Zoonosis, available from Hyacinth Girl Press. Purchase yours today!

Kelly Boyker’s work has appeared in many places, including, but not limited to, PANK, Prick of the Spindle, Arsenic Lobster, Opium Magazine and FRiGG. Her work has been Pushcart nominated and won the Richard Hugo House Power of Place Annual Inquiry. Recently, she was honored to participate in the Fainting Couch Idioglossia collaborative anthology from Blood Pudding Press. When she is not at her mortgage-paying job she acts as as the poetry editor of Menacing Hedge. She lives in Seattle with four cats, one dog and her wonderful husband, Gio.

This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected Nicole Oquendo. Nicole Oquendo is an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, and the Nonfiction Editor of Best of the Net. Her most recently published essays and poetry can be found in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, Storm Cellar, and Truck.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Kelly Boyker’s “Vanishing Points”

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Vanishing Points

Because the absence of prettiness can lead to invisibility
she bit a clean circle in the flesh around her wrists,
ringed in red wells, used her teeth for the degloving,
veins and sinews tucked neatly under bone,
in love with her own blood.

Because the molar necklace sweltered at her throat
she held his body against a wall and outlined him
with a privet green crayon to stave off the black-luck
flickering on and off like a distant radio tower,
his red eye perched between steel beams,
while the slight vibration in the steering column under her hands
indicated imbalance.

Because it was not the first time he’d gone missing
she stretched her arms and grew oddly vast,
left no evidence behind, because at that juncture
there was only amputation. Flesh dissolved,
all the particular tricks to disappearing
down straight to the bottom of things.

 

“Vanishing Points” appeared in Kelly Boyker’s book, Zoonosis, available from Hyacinth Girl Press. Purchase yours today!

Kelly Boyker’s work has appeared in many places, including, but not limited to, PANK, Prick of the Spindle, Arsenic Lobster, Opium Magazine and FRiGG. Her work has been Pushcart nominated and won the Richard Hugo House Power of Place Annual Inquiry. Recently, she was honored to participate in the Fainting Couch Idioglossia collaborative anthology from Blood Pudding Press. When she is not at her mortgage-paying job she acts as as the poetry editor of Menacing Hedge. She lives in Seattle with four cats, one dog and her wonderful husband, Gio. 

This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected Nicole Oquendo. Nicole Oquendo is an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, and the Nonfiction Editor of Best of the Net. Her most recently published essays and poetry can be found in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, Storm Cellar, and Truck.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Kelly Boyker’s “Naugahyde”

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Naugahyde

She meets you at the door draped in white fur, animal tails dripping
all around her ankles and asks if you have the right address. As she
turns away you see just the red tips of her nipples and needle marks,
like badger bites, down her neck. She smiles and beckons you to the
living room where young men slumber naked, coiled in bear, rabbit,
and fox. This is not night but a brilliant day in which a gorged fly
taps at the window and pale water laps against the levy. She rubs her
face against your wrist and something inside you turns over. Amber
lights wink over rising water. Warning or promise, all shimmery
and glistening, her teeth stitch patterns impossible to unravel. Later,
you’ll retrace you steps to the point before you unwound to the girl
in the coat, rank with fish stench, who invited you in with a turn of
mink and copper hair.

 

“Naugahyde” appeared in Kelly Boyker’s book, Zoonosis, available from Hyacinth Girl Press. Purchase yours today!

Kelly Boyker’s work has appeared in many places, including, but not limited to, PANK, Prick of the Spindle, Arsenic Lobster, Opium Magazine and FRiGG. Her work has been Pushcart nominated and won the Richard Hugo House Power of Place Annual Inquiry. Recently, she was honored to participate in the Fainting Couch Idioglossia collaborative anthology from Blood Pudding Press. When she is not at her mortgage-paying job she acts as as the poetry editor of Menacing Hedge. She lives in Seattle with four cats, one dog and her wonderful husband, Gio.

This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected Nicole Oquendo. Nicole Oquendo is an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, and the Nonfiction Editor of Best of the Net. Her most recently published essays and poetry can be found in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, Storm Cellar, and Truck.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Kelly Boyker’s “The Child Cyclops”

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The Child Cyclops
The famous child of Tourcoing, France, was born with only one eye located in the
center of her forehead. She was perfectly normal in every other way, and lived to
the age of fifteen. –Robert Ripley, 1929

At first it was easy
hiding the child from the light,
lying in her bassinet,
her one eye tracking a mobile
of Hydra, Griffin, Hippogriff, Roc,
her laughter only detectable by creatures
thick with impossible claws.

But as she grew and wandered the village
the whispers became a swallowed nosebleed,
thickening in her throat as pudding skin.

She beseeched the sky
which would not be sated
by her flooded head,
by the loathsome eye.

Her single suitor held her
in the darkness of the henhouse,
slipped his hands beneath her bodice
and when the tentacles of his tongue
circled her ears
she admitted everything:
the small fires licking the floorboards,
the rat she accidentally swallowed,
the narrow fissures between the monoliths,
and that she was perhaps not a fully mortal girl. 

In the end there was no real confession,
only her mouth like an entry wound
ringed with infection,
the tiny taking teeth, the rotten hooves, 

and her single eye
unmaking even as the stones commenced,
adding and subtracting.

 

“The Child Cyclops” appeared in Kelly Boyker’s book, Zoonosis, available from Hyacinth Girl Press. Purchase yours today!

Kelly Boyker’s work has appeared in many places, including, but not limited to, PANK, Prick of the Spindle, Arsenic Lobster, Opium Magazine and FRiGG. Her work has been Pushcart nominated and won the Richard Hugo House Power of Place Annual Inquiry. Recently, she was honored to participate in the Fainting Couch Idioglossia collaborative anthology from Blood Pudding Press. When she is not at her mortgage-paying job she acts as as the poetry editor of Menacing Hedge. She lives in Seattle with four cats, one dog and her wonderful husband, Gio.

This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected Nicole Oquendo. Nicole Oquendo is an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, and the Nonfiction Editor of Best of the Net. Her most recently published essays and poetry can be found in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, Storm Cellar, and Truck.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Kelly Boyker’s “Little Red”

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Little Red
                (after Mab Graves)

Of course the story begins with a wolf
who carries enchantments stuck in his coat as burrs
and curses he can dispense with his teeth,
ruby collar glittering between the forest snags.

This is what he says to me:
I will not eat you, but if necessary
I promise to make it painless,
a gentle de-boning, the place the mouth goes —
your wet and messy entrails.
You shall float near the tree canopy, ecstatic
as I pull your entire body through my teeth.

My heart is a muscle pendant, swinging,
adorned in an argument of everything
that has gone missing in this thin limb of all
that remains. I ask only that he reconsider

the cone I have placed around his neck,
the way he walks into walls, confused,
the way my bitten-off fingers
can no longer stroke his ruff, and reconsider
the elegance of his need.

 

“Little Red” appeared in Kelly Boyker’s book, Zoonosis, available from Hyacinth Girl Press. Purchase yours today!

Kelly Boyker’s work has appeared in many places, including, but not limited to, PANK, Prick of the Spindle, Arsenic Lobster, Opium Magazine and FRiGG. Her work has been Pushcart nominated and won the Richard Hugo House Power of Place Annual Inquiry. Recently, she was honored to participate in the Fainting Couch Idioglossia collaborative anthology from Blood Pudding Press. When she is not at her mortgage-paying job she acts as as the poetry editor of Menacing Hedge. She lives in Seattle with four cats, one dog and her wonderful husband, Gio.

This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected Nicole Oquendo. Nicole Oquendo is an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, and the Nonfiction Editor of Best of the Net. Her most recently published essays and poetry can be found in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, Storm Cellar, and Truck.