11-17-2025
Kristin Bock & L.I. Henley
This is an excerpt from a collaborative chapbook in progress, written with poet and artist, L.I. Henley: The Dreaming Rifle, an anti-pastoral and lyrical fable centered around the disappearance of a young, teenage girl told by a chorus of animated objects—a scythe, a clawfoot bathtub, a rifle, a field of red poppies, etc. The choir of voices acts as unreliable witnesses, as jury, and as sorrowful chroniclers of an all-too-common occurrence. Slowly, the voices reveal the girl's story while also posing questions about the reader's complicity in systemic violence. The poem below was penned by Bock.
THE DREAMING RIFLE
RIBBON
I am speaking to you from the end
of the flat world by a waterfall
that plummets all the way to Pluto,
where silence and dream pass like ships
and are gone. This is how you live
when you have nothing left
to hold onto. Up all night, I listen
to something drag its trap closer.
I tie myself into knots at the thought
of the girl who left as softly as a silhouette
at dawn. Out the open window, I watch
a doe step into the wide field, her breath,
cool and blue, blooms like morning
glories on the trellis—all those pendulous,
poisonous seeds within reach.
Despite the silk and slight of me,
she can see me
swinging from the sill by daybreak.
DRESS AND RIBBON
I feel empty, says the dress to the ribbon. I know, says the ribbon to the dress, stretching her blueness across the vanity. It’s cold, the window wide open in December. Outside, the moon is big and yellow, clouds slipping apart like petticoat seams. Where is the girl and her delicate hands? says the dress. I don’t know, says the ribbon. Remember her voice, the song she sang about a swing and a boy? A sheet tied to the bedpost billows like a sail. I remember her singing sadly to the moon, says the dress. Yes, says the ribbon. Her hair was as silky as moth wings. I could barely hang on.
DAWN
Rising from a garden bed,
I stumble over bodies
still asleep in the grass,
spear my blue silk blouse
on the spires of pines, bleed
across the vaulted clouds,
and vanish into the orchard
where my tiny feet
leave a crooked trail
of black seeds
down the slip-
pery
spiral
staircase
of an apple.
DOVECOTE
Gunshots from the woods
cause a fierce fluttering—
Brooklyn, Stella, Emma
Like warm water, they blow
right through me.
Ella, Anna, Shelly
The lost become doves
before they are found
Dottie, Jody, Jada
in a ditch, in the deep
folds of a meadow.
Mary, Amber, Sherry
A limbo
of afternoons for
Hayley, Hannah, Pearl
If you cup your hand
and blow into it, you will know
Ava, Isabelle, Mia
the burden of a soul. I am
a house built of sad lines,
Luna, Grace, Lily
my side broken open
to the moon. Inside me,
Alice, Allie, Ivy
a stem, some seeds,
a button, a ribbon blue—
the weight of things
sown and flown.
RAIN
In a summer growing cold
Queen Anne's lace
are snowflakes. Hard grapes,
thirsty bees--a beast
in the waterdark leaves. Light
grows black with knowing
long shadows at the end of day.
There is an immense meadow
inside us. O to close
like the spent cups of flowers!
We the fallen, we the risen,
we the lidless, we the rain.
DOVECOTE AND RAIN
Dovecote: Give me wind, lightning’s crude language across the sky.
Rain: We fall like bolts of silk onto the faces of poppies. Like threaded stars into the thirsty mouth of the cistern.
Dovecote: You are a lover stroking me with a million small mirrors. Who else are you?
Rain: We are talons on the tin roof of a barn, vapors of spirits in the still.
Dovecote: What do you see tonight?
Rain: Everything. I see a farmer stumbling from his still, ripping his fist across the teeth of his boy.
Dovecote: The grass feels like razors when the wind picks up.
Rain: I see the boy sneaking moonshine for the pain, lurching through flooded fields to throw stones at a farmhouse window. I see a girl sliding a blue ribbon from her gold-red hair, night dress falling to her waist.
Dovecote: Does the boy see her?
Rain: She’s a warbled ghost behind wet glass.
Dovecote: Can you see the dead fluttering inside me?
Rain: We hear them. Cries issue from their fluted bones. Like windchimes, they wish to be ravished.
Dovecote: How they long for the distillation of the soul! Can you save them?
Rain: No. Never.
Dovecote: Can you tell the future?
Rain: Yes, we live in cycles.
Dovecote: What becomes of the boy?
Rain: We see his face reflected in the cistern, six bird bones for a mouth.
Dovecote: And of the girl?
Rain: We see a dove weaving its nest with strands of her hair left golden in the ropes of a swing.
Dovecote: How will I know her?
Rain: Listen for the sound of hammering between two mountains, then a cry like no other.
RIFLE
I wake inside the hollow
of an oak, the sun leaking
behind the field trees. Slowly at first,
the body is hauled skyward,
lifting her from the mouth of
a weeping cistern, her hair
heavy, dripping like ropes
undone. Her spring feet
dangling like a ragdoll towed
by a toddler, wearily to sleep.
From the swarm of flashing
lights, someone emerges to turn
her blowfly body face-up. It’s occupied.
Tenanted. Accompanied.
No longer alone. Had I a twilight
in which she could have hidden.
Had I a cloven dovecote or a field
of forgotten bathtubs—
crazed, clawfooted, filling
with rainwater and just her size.
-from The Dreaming Rifle, a currently unpublished chapbook co-written by Kristin Bock and L.I. Henley--celebrated with the author's permission and selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Founder and Editor, Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
Kristin Bock is the author of two collections of poetry published by Tupelo Press: Cloisters (2008) and Glass Bikini (2020). Her work was featured in The Best American Poetry 2022 and is forthcoming in The Surreal-Absurd Anthology, due for publication by Mercurius Press in July 2025. A Massachusetts Cultural Council fellow, she holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where teaches Business Communication. She lives in Western, MA with her husband and together they restore liturgical art. Visit Kristin at https://kristinbock.mystrikingly.com and follow her on Instagram @kbock777.
L.I. Henley was born and raised in the Mojave Desert of California. A paper artist and writer, her books include Starshine Road (Perugia Press Prize, 2017) and the novella-in-verse, Whole Night Through. Her art, poetry, and prose have appeared most recently in Adroit, Brevity, Ninth Letter, The Indianapolis Review, Calyx, The Bellingham Review, The Los Angeles Review, Waxing, Diode, The Southeast Review, Southern Humanities Review, and The Cincinnati Review. Her personal essays have been awarded the Arts & Letters/Susan Atefat Prize and the Robert and Adele Schiff Award. She is the creator of Paper Dolls & Books. Follow her on Instagram @lihenleyart.
