Kristin Bock

poems from glass bikini

Part creation myth, part prophecy, Kristin Bock’s Glass Bikini stitches together the fabrics of our dystopian present, reminding us of our culpability and power in this grand, human experiment. These often darkly humorous poems guide readers into dreamscapes and underworlds that are ominously contemporary. From a looking-glass planet, we peer back at our own homes and see the news as a horror movie. There is the sickening feeling that something has gone terribly wrong. Monsters prowl here inspired as much by Sarah Kane as Mary Shelley. We hold a tiny prehistoric horse in our paws. We are masochistic voodoo dolls traipsing hand in hand through grisliness and the sublime. If there is any hope in this nightmarish proliferation of cyborgs and militia, it lies within the liberating powers of the feminine. Glass Bikini is both mirror and warning, asking us to see our own strange and terrifying shapes, the monsters we have helped create, and the ones we have become.

OVERCOME

And it came to pass, art became extinct. Still, we flocked to museums

and stared into barren rooms. Look! Someone would exclaim. There’s a

man rolling around on the floor, acting like an unbalanced washing machine,

knocking into things and coughing up wet rags. Isn’t it horrifying? Oh yes,

excruciating, someone would yell out. People whizzed in Duchamp’s missing

fountain. They blew each other like whistles where L’Origine du monde

used to hang. They wept under restroom signs for what might have been.

People shredded their clothes, oozed from chandeliers. Entire floors

wailed, cackled, threw their necks back so far, they almost snapped. A

child said, Look, those red velvet ropes clearly symbolize our happiness, and

another child said, oh no, our happiness symbolizes those red velvet ropes. And

thus began the gnashing of hair and the pulling of teeth that lasted for the

rest of the unknown world.

THE KILLING SHOW

For a long time, I watched a boy on the beach sneak up on a wounded

seabird. He stepped slowly, gently as if through a maze of mines. When,

finally, he towered over the bird foundering on its side, and pelted it

with small, smooth stones. You’ll like me, yelled the boy. You’ll like me! As

the bird cried louder, the boy dropped heavier stones. The sun leaked.

The waves claimed the bird and, as our shadows grew larger, we all

grew smaller.

THE VAST WIDE-OPEN SPACE AREA

The Vast Wide-Open Space Area is the name of a park in my hometown.

It was election year, and I was lounging under a walnut tree. Amid the

danger of falling nuts, I met a man with a star-spangled shield, ten blue

fingers and a pilly, red facemask. Together, on a park bench, we admired a

map of Connecticut, noted great town names like Bethlehem and Bozrah.

We noticed some black dots were larger than other black dots. He was very

clever. He showed me the atlas had a face, and the United States was the

forehead of the world. Imagine, for me he signed an entire book of checks!

For the rest of the afternoon, we watched a man paint a flagpole from the

bottom up. And so we parted—his silhouette punching a hole in the paper

sky. My heart growing stars and stripes.

BINDING SPELL

I make a doll of you. I make a doll of me. I stuff us full of feathers,

fingernails and fur. Stitching us up, I drop a dollop of blood in our trunks.

I light a candle with a lock of your hair, sprinkle salt. I coat our poppets

with oil and slip your little wooden hand up my woolen skirt. Pinch my

tiny nipples with clothespins. I strike our sex parts together like flints and

say, Anima Animus, this is how we truss, truss, truss. I wire our wrists,

our knees, our navels, our tongues, our flirting shadows. I pierce your red

wax heart with a bouquet of pins. I fasten the exact angle our last breaths

intersect on the Table of Improbable Sums. I hobble you. I drive a nail

through us both. Forgive me, beloved. If only I could keep you in a chair by

my side, always forming a word, I’d refrain from cutting off your hands and

stitching them in reverse. I know it hurts to bear your palms to the world.

There’s no better way to reach me when I’m burning on the other side.

SNOWGLOBE

For days, I waded through snowdrifts, holding moose antlers above my

head. I caught voles, slid their bodies onto the points and stacked them

neatly as hors d’oeuvres. After a time, I carved an entire Magic Kingdom of

Ice to guard against the starved and directionless. Sometimes, I can hear

them calling my name on the snowmobile trails, through the bent spruce

and balsam firs. Wendy, Wendy! Come home, Wendy, we forgive you! But they

are liars. Something thin and cold like a wafer breaks inside me. There is

a deep trembling. Then everything goes white again.

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We hope you enjoyed reading these featured poems from Glass Bikini. If you are craving more, we highly recommend reading her entire collection.

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Kristin Bock holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where she teaches. Her first collection, Cloisters, won Tupelo Press’s First Book Award and the da Vinci Eye Award. She is a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellow, and her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Black Warrior Review, Columbia, Crazyhorse, FENCE, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and VERSE. She lives in Western, MA with her husband, artist Geoffrey Kostecki, and together they restore liturgical art.

Follow Kristin on Twitter @bock_kristin