I said no I just don’t know how this could have happened
any of it
and there was a hush to the room like something deadly
sitting down like an osprey maybe or
father and I got up to leave thinking that the
doorknob couldn’t be dusted by police to find me
I could go
I could do anything
—fromKill the Dogs
2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize Selection
__________
Heather Bell: “Once upon a time there was a six-foot-tall woman with blue hair and a sense of smallness. In her house was a teacup saying ‘girl, you got this!’ and on her wall was a kitten hanging from a clothesline. The kitten’s word balloon said something like, ‘Hang in there!’ or ‘Don’t let go!’ Always something with an exclamation mark. Isn’t that the moral of the story, always? There is always a small woman, hiding her grandness, trying to fill up on uplifting wordplay. But today, this small woman sits down and writes a poem in which she details her smallness and why she came to be that way. Another small woman reads it, and from the tip of her hair a fire starts, but just as quickly dies. Isn’t that why we are here? To write another poem for a small woman to read, and then another. Until the amount of sparks are too much for the quick extinguishing, and she is a woman on fire, exploding into the world.”
“Have You Forgotten” by Heather BellPosted by Rattle
Heather Bell
HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN
Have you forgotten
the bowl of fish that you left
in the refrigerator last year and how long
you waited for me to gut and scale?
Two weeks, maybe, until it started to stink
and the fins curled over like
a woman’s eyelid
closing. It has always been what I did not do
instead of what I did, which is:
going to the field behind
our house to watch
a young woman be raped. We like to think
that in such a situation that we
would become made of wild boar to charge in
but I am a woman too and
I walked home quietly
with my eyes only open to a slit,
like the size of two small wounds
like the size of sharp small stones
that are pushed by waves over sea glass
shaping it.
—fromKill the Dogs
2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize Selection
__________
Heather Bell: “Once upon a time there was a six-foot-tall woman with blue hair and a sense of smallness. In her house was a teacup saying ‘girl, you got this!’ and on her wall was a kitten hanging from a clothesline. The kitten’s word balloon said something like, ‘Hang in there!’ or ‘Don’t let go!’ Always something with an exclamation mark. Isn’t that the moral of the story, always? There is always a small woman, hiding her grandness, trying to fill up on uplifting wordplay. But today, this small woman sits down and writes a poem in which she details her smallness and why she came to be that way. Another small woman reads it, and from the tip of her hair a fire starts, but just as quickly dies. Isn’t that why we are here? To write another poem for a small woman to read, and then another. Until the amount of sparks are too much for the quick extinguishing, and she is a woman on fire, exploding into the world.”
