March 28, 2020

Francesca Bell

LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19

for my husband, 21 years my senior

There are so many times
I could have killed you.

After 28 years of marriage—
the only contact sport
I’ve ever stuck with—

I found myself

crying this morning,
after a trip outside,
singing Happy Birthday

three times through,

just to be sure,

scrubbing despite
the sting of my split skin

as I’ve loved you
through even the rub
of the raw years.

I held my hands steady
in the water’s reassuring scald,

trying and trying
to save you.

from Poets Respond
March 28, 2020

__________

Francesca Bell: “I wrote this poem after reading an article about how, in Italy, doctors no longer intubate anyone over the age of 60. The United States hasn’t yet reached that point, but we seem far likelier to achieve the catastrophe of Italy than we do to arrive at the relative calm of South Korea, so it got me thinking about my 74-year-old husband. I make the groceries last as long as possible, but after going out today, I had to wonder if I’d carried a death sentence home to that beloved, maddening man.” (web)

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October 29, 2019

Francesca Bell

NARROW OPENINGS

A constant dripping on a day of steady rain
and a contentious woman are alike.
—Proverbs 27:15

It’s hot. The clouds’ soft faces
are closed, a billowing refusal,
and I want to quarrel
with my lover who just sits
risen dull from a bed we left
damp as horses that have run
for a long time. Hair hangs,
humid and tangled, on my neck,
but he won’t unlatch
the window. Doesn’t like
the noise, he says. I don’t
like him very much. I want
to argue until anger splits me
like flowers that burst across
my short dress. I choose
lipstick to startle him,
Ultra Violent, an assault
of color. He just watches,
his hair still holding
the shape of my hands. Raising
my legs, I let the mirror catch
me, throw him bare skin tingling
sweat. Going for a walk,
I say, slipping into the narrow openings
of sandals, smiling as anger rises
in his dim face. Down each block
I think of him pacing
the closed rooms, stupid and lovely.
Face glowing, I am an August peach.
And my feet slapping
the sidewalk are a dance
as good, as constant, as rain.

from Rattle #22, Winter 2004

__________

Francesca Bell: “I live with my husband and two children on a sunny acre of hillside. We’ve a pumpkin patch, and barn owls nesting in the oak trees, and a red-tailed hawk that perches on our fence to contemplate the songbirds. I start poems for the same reason I toss seed into this rich, dark earth: to see what grows from what at first looks like nothing.” (web)

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February 17, 2019

Francesca Bell

LATE MAMMOGRAM

Standing before the newest-fangled
3D machine, I open my gown to the tech
who leads me by my right breast
into position, cheerful but not particularly
kind, her job requiring a dedicated
sternness, the willingness to grab
what is private and lay it out
on the clear plastic breast tray
and really have a look,
her repeated instructions: Do not
raise your shoulders, keep both
feet on the floor, lean in,
and then the flattening
of the stretched-out tissues
until I just cross the border
into pain and hold myself there,
face jutting out at a weird angle
so as not to be in the way,
while the machine murmurs,
considering me as it travels
its slow arc, and the tech
instructs me periodically to
stop breathing, and it feels familiar
to hold the unnatural pose
and my breath simultaneously,
and I get to thinking about nursing,
how these tired slabs of flesh
once swelled with milk, grew
spherical as planets
with each child’s days revolving
around them, which reminds me
of Mars and the rover sent off
to take pictures of what we
cannot reach, the way this
machine makes an image
of what we cannot see, and I feel
my life slowly draining the life
from me the way we siphon everything
from this planet that once was
teeming as my breasts that day
my milk came in and shot
across the room in two narrow arcs,
and the tech tells me to step away
and breathe freely, then reaches
for my second breast and deposits it,
depleted, on the tray, and that rover failed
to solve any of our problems
though this mammogram may identify
one of mine, and as the tech shoves
and smashes me into place I
remember the tracks the rover left,
solitary in the red dust, as she went forth
and discovered there’s really nothing
there to save us, which puts me in mind
of Barbara’s biopsy and Hanna’s and Lyn’s,
their breasts become biohazard,
and I consider the biological hazards
of the years to come, and then
the machine whirs again, and once,
I read, the rover was stuck
in a dune more than a month,
and wind blew sand onto her batteries
blocking the sun but blew it back off,
and my ribs hurt and my breast,
and even the insects
are on the brink, and this week
they declared the Mars rover dead
which makes me think of the photo
of the emaciated polar bear
on his patchy ice and the one of the girl
slowly starving in Yemen, and I
wonder why I’m trying so hard
to stay alive, and, stop breathing,
says the tech, and I know
my battery is low
and it’s getting dark.

from Poets Respond
February 17, 2019

__________

Francesca Bell: “I read with interest and a strange sadness many articles about Opportunity, the long-lived Mars rover, finally being declared dead. There was something somehow human about the robot, and I found myself thinking of her as I interacted with the 3D x-ray machine that was used to perform my mammogram. I had also been reading during the week of the collapsing insect world and the melting glaciers and the cataclysm that was to come but is actually, in slow motion, already upon us.” (web)

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January 21, 2019

Max Sessner

IT IS

Sunday and the bells
tolling to services one last
look in the mirror and
the pastor climbs into the pulpit
I want a new car
Father in heaven but something always
goes amiss and so we find
instead in the evening an
injured blackbird in the garden you make
your dress bloody as you
carry it gently into the house it doesn’t
bother you maybe you say
we’ll remember this day years from now
or we’ll dream of it
my dear your hair by the way
is going gray bit by bit and the bird will
likely not survive the night

 

—translated from the German by Francesca Bell

from Rattle #61, Fall 2018

__________

Max Sessner: “Why do I love poems? Every morning, I rode the bus from the village into the city to school. At one station, the old poet boarded. He was fat and looked friendly, a little like Pablo Neruda. He seated himself with the women who were also riding into the city. Unexpectedly, he began to recite his poems. The women laughed. I was impressed. They maybe weren’t especially good poems, but what does that mean? For a moment, the bus was a driving poem, and I sat inside it.” (web)

Francesca Bell: “I discovered Max Sessner’s poems in an Austrian journal called Manuskripte five months ago. Since then, I have translated 39 of them. His poems have a delicious combination of deep melancholy and dark humor, a mixture I am unable to resist, one I return to again and again. I’m proud and grateful to be the first person to translate his beautiful work into English.” (web)

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January 18, 2019

Max Sessner

AUGUST EVENING

and chlorine scent on my shirt from
the swimming pool the aunts
are there smiling slipping me
small change and what do you
want to be someday they
ask the spirit I say of the
boy who drowned last
year while swimming
his bicycle still stood in winter
in front of the pool oh they sigh
and one scuttles to the bathroom
no one budges until
finally there’s a flush

 

—translated from the German by Francesca Bell

from Rattle #61, Fall 2018

__________

Max Sessner: “Why do I love poems? Every morning, I rode the bus from the village into the city to school. At one station, the old poet boarded. He was fat and looked friendly, a little like Pablo Neruda. He seated himself with the women who were also riding into the city. Unexpectedly, he began to recite his poems. The women laughed. I was impressed. They maybe weren’t especially good poems, but what does that mean? For a moment, the bus was a driving poem, and I sat inside it.” (web)

Francesca Bell: “I discovered Max Sessner’s poems in an Austrian journal called Manuskripte five months ago. Since then, I have translated 39 of them. His poems have a delicious combination of deep melancholy and dark humor, a mixture I am unable to resist, one I return to again and again. I’m proud and grateful to be the first person to translate his beautiful work into English.” (web)

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January 8, 2019

Francesca Bell

I LONG TO HOLD THE POETRY EDITOR’S PENIS IN MY HAND

and tell him personally,
I’m sorry, but I’m going
to have to pass on this.
Though your piece
held my attention through
the first few screenings,
I don’t feel it is a good fit
for me at this time.
Please know it received
my careful consideration.
I thank you for allowing
me to have a look,
and I wish you
the very best of luck
placing it elsewhere.

from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

__________

Francesca Bell: “I write poetry in an attempt to draw as close as possible to the world around me and to the people in it. For me, poetry should be intimate, bare, wild, and a little ragged. If you can’t go for your own jugular, you shouldn’t write.” (web)

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January 21, 2018

Francesca Bell

GIRLFRIEND OF LAS VEGAS GUNMAN SAYS HER FINGERPRINTS WOULD LIKELY BE ON AMMO

When it was hard for him
to sleep
she matched her breath to his
then waited
while they arced together
into night’s grave,
consciousness like a shot
pulled beneath
the line of its trajectory
by the force
no one can see. Those stale
Sundays they ended
up at the range with a bag
of guns
lugged in heavy from the car.
The open air
always did them good, and there
was something
intimate in seeing him
take aim.
He always bested everyone,
tore up the place.
After, she did her small part
while they watched
news of other people’s
cataclysms.
Ammunition wedged warm
between them
on the couch, they loaded
the magazines.
Each elegant bullet
was powerless
without its weapon.
Like a woman
with no man to see her.
Sometimes,
she wants him back.
He touched her
the way she touched
those bodies.
Her fingerprints
entering them
on every round,
his love
lodged inside her
like a ghost.

from Poets Respond
January 21, 2018

__________

Francesca Bell: “I wrote this poem in response to news reports this past week about Marilou Danley’s fingerprints being on the ammunition used by Stephen Paddock in the Las Vegas massacre. I feel great empathy for Ms. Danley. When I was young, I had serious relationships with two different gun enthusiasts. These men owned many different guns—including assault rifles—and one I shared a home with for three years. I spent many Sunday afternoons at one gun range or another back then, and I handled all kinds of ammunition and firearms. One boyfriend was a police officer and the other an avid hunter, so the possibility existed that my fingerprints might have been found on a bullet that had ended a life. Additionally, I’ve personally known four individuals who have killed someone. Three of the killings were sanctioned by the state, and one ended in a prison sentence. Though I was appalled and astonished by the enormity of what each man had done, my emotional attachment to them remained. I did not stop loving them. I imagine Marilou Danley still loves Stephen Paddock. I imagine she misses him, despite everything. And I imagine she is haunted to think of where her fingers’ prints have been, of what suffering was inflicted there.” (web)

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