VILLAINS love poems KRISTY BOWEN
VILLAINS love poems
dancing girl press & studio, 2024 by Kristy Bowen
origin story
The internet tells me the hero will always sacrifice love for the good of the world. Will throw himself in front of buses and into canyons. Will place his hands over his eyes and drop from bridges just in time to save the city from destruction while his gal waits tied to the railroad tracks. In the hands of men in dark warehouses that smell of gasoline and rotting garbage. Will choose the world, not the girl. It’s what heroes do.
The villains such suckers for love, they’d burn the world to touch her. To knot themselves through her hair. Would give any number of lives and bodies to lie down on the bed and sleep curled against her while helicopters hover like dragonflies outside. And who’s to say they’re wrong. All of us fools and foils to someone, drinking coffee and writing love songs while the sky fills with smoke.
villains
In the insect world, it’s kill or be killed. Thrive or die trying. The iridescent beetles gather on the stems of the rose bush just as quickly as we pluck them off, drop them into a bucket of water. We falter over pesticides and news of daily suicides from multistory buildings. What we couldn’t grasp was where they came from, the dead and dying. How they walked around for years with one foot on the other side. How there were suddenly so many of them, walking into traffic and floating soundlessly out to sea. What had undone them in the current that held the rest of us fast, fastened to our boats? The beetles held tenaciously to the pink blooms, but sometimes
I thought I might perish, for no particular reason than my own immobility. On some whim, drive the kitchen knife into my thigh. The car into the lagoon. If I sat very still in the garden, death could brush its fingers along my collarbone and I wouldn’t flinch. Wouldn’t pitch forward and tumble into black.
On Wednesdays, the villains wear black. Press their backs against the wall in stairwells and supply closets. All tattered lace and fishnets. Smudged eyeliner and breathy sighs. They keep walking home in heels at 4am, falling into beds and forests and other damp, twisty places. Keep losing grocery lists and eyeglasses, they are so busy doing evil. So busy fucking up your life, they forget dentist appointments and dog groomers. Loom over cocktail parties like a cloud of dark sugar. All the villains want your husbands. Your fathers. Your sons. To collect them like glorious insects, roll their fingers over the cracks in their bodies. The busted femur, the mangled collar. Mine, a history of car crashes and a broken spine. A pining that ate itself from the inside. A woman entering a room alone is
not to be trusted. Not to be flustered. Could go off suddenly like a rocket or a gun.
Darwin proposed that animals will fight or flee under the threat of aggression. Some will fold their wings tight around the body and stay very still for years until the danger has passed. Until the door has closed and the revelers all gone home to beds and monsters and tucked in children. Will break their limbs to be so small. Will starve themselves to be a sliver of light. When we fight, I suspect a torrent of wasps has infested the house. It hums and shifts. Hard to tell if the swelling of the paper nest was the wind or wildness. Hard to tell if the flutter in our bellies was an orchestration of wings or the dead come back crawling.
If love makes us villains, we’ve no choice but to linger in bed. Twine our fingers and stretch. To beat and flutter, to curl inside. Love makes us stupid and sick with longing in the worst ways. Sticky amid moth-ridden sheets. I place my hand on your chest and our lungs fill with cicada husks and witches. In the kitchen, the dishes all broken, but there’s a mouse in a teacup. A rose in a glass. Love is a spell we keep writing with words on chinese menus and across each other’s back. Such solace in the way the years burn away like candles we lit to find all the ways we were lost.
The best villains are starstruck. Lucky like the dead. Bedding starlets and cocktail waitresses fed on midnight waffles and bad decisions. We went looking for evil and found only moths, flickering the porchlight. Found only rotting cedar and windblown leaves. Heaving houses spread against the dusk. The best villains, you do not know are villains. In your bed, in your kitchen. In another story, they’d be heroes. In another life, throwing themselves into burning buildings and rappelling out the windows. Who knows what they harbor in their hearts or hands. How many of them tuck themselves into ordinary life like a note just begging to be found.
For years, I was a villain and I didn’t know it. Willing to blow up the world for love or languish. For pretty language and the ways we bent it into shapes like balloons made into poodles. I couldn’t love the men, most of them stuck, grown large, in the rooms of the body where I tried. Taking up too much space in the rafters where the poems hid like children. Too much noise in the basement where we kept the dogs that swallowed the fingers of burglars intent on ravishing the armoires and smashing all the windows. What grace we offered the strangers who danced on our feet, who leaned close in bars and swallowed cocktail umbrellas and entire summers. Someone’s villains, all of us. Hiding in the closets and ransacking every bed.
The villains hide in closets and cul-de-sacs. Slide into your DMs in the middle of the night. Thirsty and aching. Baking cakes made of Barbie parts and bombs. The villains had no exit, so they cobbled one with bloody hands, smashed the windows and tore out the nails with their teeth. What the villains wanted deep in the heart of the house where you slept, drugged up and drifting. Whatever they could find pillaging the cupboards for warm blankets and old photos of birthday parties. Broken antiques and rusted watches. The villains snatched whatever they could carry and left the houses as silent as they came, shedding hair strands and lipstick lids. No one knows what they wanted first, the rush or the scavenge. The flush of their cheeks wild in the escape.
By summer, the gutters have clogged with hapless heroes. They glitter, all in white, when the wind shifts. Keep hefting themselves into stories with swords and knives and slickly shined boots. They’ll kill you if it means the world will stop ticking soundly toward its demise. That you’ll stop torching villagers and settle down to white picket fences and Percocet. Will stop dying your hair black and fucking strangers in the bathrooms of bars. Will lull you with sugar like a horse before they stick the blade square in your heart. You weren’t a villain in the beginning but could get used to it. The chaos that lives at the back of your lids. The gut that pulls you like a string toward dark, soft places. Where you bed down and wait to be saved or slaughtered, whichever comes first.
All the best villains sing sad, lonesome love songs. Bring a knife to a gunfight, a swagger to their step. The best villains could kill a man with a paper clip and stick of gum. Could outrun the devil in heels, the wheels of a black sedan spinning on a dirt road. Lie their way into beds and weddings, wide eyed and blinking. Could drink you under the table. Bibles and babies and pretty sighs. The best villains trade secrets like coins placed on the palm, then flipped in the air. Heads, love. Tails, terror. All the villains feral with mascara and mysterious pasts. Maps and tampons stuffed in their glovebox. Angels hovering over the jukebox, dropping cigarette butts into a glass.
If I m a villain, you’re a villain too. A million stars bursting through space and this one burns bright and hot over springtime streets. Loosens our tongues and the buttons of my dress. Makes us long for dark liquor and your hand on my ass. Grasping the sheets in the grayness of dawn. Villains always lie, but in lying, get closer to the truth. A journey back across a burning city, a bomb, a brushfire. Lush and spacious, it’s a selfish place, love is, and the things we throw into it. Or what we take out, ash flaking on our hands.
The summer that the dragonflies swarm the city, we warm and glisten. Listen as the air pulses and thrums with a million flutters. Step over specimens littering the sidewalk, thick antennae and whispery wings. The males will stab each other with their bodies, mid-air, to claim a mate. Will fasten themselves to her, hooked together, and fly in a circle. My friends and I collect the corpses in sandwich bags and tiny glass jars. Make art of death. Breath of chaos. Toss ourselves into August and see what shakes out. What breaks us in the heat. I place the dead ones in a line. Ready the pins and tweezers. Arrange them in a box. Who is more dangerous, them or I? I don’t know. Only that their legs crush under the weight of my palm. Catch in the nest of my hair.
No one was paying attention when the villains became monsters. When they sprouted wings and horns and crooked fingers that scraped the bottom of the bed. No one heard the ragged way their voices soared and receded underneath the music we played to drown out the neighbors fighting or crying or dying. No one was looking as they slid through dreams, dragging a hooked hand through the sheets. In the heat, I would sit in the bathtub in a white nightgown and read magazines covered in beauties and baked goods. Would float in the lukewarm water til dusk. The pink of my fingers pruning while I shivered and sweltered. No real in between. No Heaven. No Hell for the monsters that lurked inside us. Kept trying to swim their way out.
God help us if the villain loves us. Hovers over the
bed and the bassinet. Plunges us into black and back into light like drowning. The villains poured us coffee and sang us songs and still the villain would recede like the iris of an eye into places we could not follow. Borrow a flashlight or cash and disappear for years inside a forest. We’d wait with picnic baskets and a collection of butterflies in the clearing, nothing but the wind in our ears and hearts. Nothing but the shake the leaves made when passing. Every branch quake and shift of stones the villain come back for us. But we'd turn to find only bones and breakage, a thin shadow on the grass.
The villains try to leave no trace. Pace the house
looking for lost hairbrushes and discarded lingerie. Fear they left a burnt out match in the kitchen too near the stove and now the whole thing will go up. Maybe love makes us stupid. Careless. Casting our nets wide in the sky. Love, the only weapon to yield sometimes. The brick through the window. The knife through the cake. We’d fake it if we could. Wrap our limbs around it and call it ours. But love makes us scavengers. Searching the yard for mint or poison. Putting it in our tea.
If we’re villains, we’re in it together. Feathered beds and famine in equal measure. Setting the morning alarms while the house burns slowly down. I hand you the match and harbor the gas can under the bed. No telling what wars we leave behind with our breath. What we trust the other will not destroy or take in the middle of the night. The battle over cotton sheets and shattered wineglasses. The throttle of death in our throats that comes out as a song. As a spell I keep writing letters to in the dim. Where the curtains glow and swell with wind.
The villains gather in the forest at midnight. Lather themselves into frenzy and fluency in tongues. Rung by rung through the trees and out over the clearing. There’s no telling which way the wind blows them, Swept down your chimney or between your baseboards. You wanted love and now it drops rose petals, brown with age, in your lap. Snips a lock of your hair, a sliver of nail and the next thing you know, you’re cursed with happiness. Doused with longing. Pointing your rod at anything warmblooded enough to survive the winter. To thrive amid such terrible hunger.