Francesca Bell Q&A on obstacles to becoming a poet
Francesca Bell talks about the obstacles she encounters in being a poet.
Matt OD
And Then
the man remembers your body, remembers to love you again, flicks you like a switch waiting, ready in the room’s shadows. Loneliness rises from each reclaimed centimeter, a humiliating eagerness rushing you like a hound loosed in woods, your cry like baying or keening, months of waiting become sound. After, the man sleeps, peaceful, but […]
Committee Work
The football players, when accused of raping the drunk girl, said she had approached them, pulled their pants down and sucked their penises into her mouth. One claimed he was unable to achieve an erection despite her efforts. Another felt inappropriate, zipped up, and walked out. One was seen […]
How Like a God
Making tiny work of what I could not budge, the bear lifted my left-out cooler—so heavy it would have taken two people to stagger it to safety— and slammed it down, snapping its hinges. I lay in my flimsy shelter as he tore into what he wanted, smacked his lips, snuffled loudly for […]
In Which Mary Advises You to Have the Abortion
In the beginning, every last one of them overshadows like a god. Their flesh, with its insistent power of resurrection, rends easily your inadequate membrane, silly shroud that surrenders as destiny is foisted upon you. A woman’s door is always ajar. A child makes itself at home, swelling you, as death does the […]
Letter to the Man Who Said I Stayed on His Brain Like a Hit of Acid That Wouldn’t Kick In
I thought of you this morning, our six years of letters, and the time you kissed me in the Saturday schoolyard. How we swung from side to side. Together, away. It was October then, like it is every year, like it is now, and that kiss tastes like green apples and leaves flaming in the […]
Severance
I’m one of those men, he told me with a crooked little smile, reaching gingerly across the space between us. Men you read about in history books, he said, as his right hand, the hand with one finger gone AWOL, vanished into the darkness up my skirt and crept beyond my underwear’s flimsy barrier. It […]