Jennifer Hollie Bowles
The Red Whore Dares his Hoary Hands
He put me on a puritan video in black and white so he wouldn’t know the real me; the white lace dress belied my willingness to dance naked. We went straight from his sterile bed to an apocalyptic quarry, where he climbed the fake owl to avoid my eyes, launched his hands around my waist to forget that he is no longer a young man. Our rite of passage into friendship paper-cut his heart, broke the coils of his safety machine, until my spine glowed in the dark, all neon- like in sweet boy dreams. I wonder what is left of me… What can he touch that hasn’t been broken? I should just leave him alone, but the cold hunger in his blue eyes lights me up, conjures every lost gypsy stimulating my cunt. Drowning in the gray of his lens, someone else wants to own me, but there will never be anyone else.
Jennifer Hollie Bowles lives in Knoxville, TN, where she slashes malaise and distills the moon. She is the editor of The Medulla Review, and her word-hunching obsession has lead to publication in The Battered Suitcase, blossombones, Echo Ink Review, Thieves Jargon, tinfoildresses, Word Riot, and The New York Quarterly, among many others. Eccentric to a fault line, Jennifer prefers chaos to constancy.
