1/21/2020
Francesca Bell
Every Two Hours, the Letdown Burns
By the time I uncover my breast—
t-shirt, bra, nursing pad—
the baby is at full cry,
its wide-open wailing
like a kettle at hard boil,
over-roiling, at scream.
The sound is a pulled trigger,
spraying milk everywhere.
The duvet will sour.
My shirt, stain.
In this circuit, I’m neither detonator
nor what absorbs the charge.
I’m the casing left behind,
the part blown empty.
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 behind her
with his pants down,
but none could say
whose fluids were found
in her vagina
or her underwear or her ass.
The school had no interest
in DNA. The committee
closed the case, and
the football players went on
to an undefeated season,
trampling team after team.
They ran joyfully,
faster than the opposition,
faster even than all
the drunk girls who rush
to their knees, who bend over
pool tables and couches,
no longer content
to just ask for it,
no, those bitches
reach out to take it.
Revision
Each month comes the reminder
of the gash God made in me.
I like to think He made it
with one finger, the way an artist
will reach right into a painting
and finish it off. Not bothering
with brush or sponge,
just making with a finger
that last mark needed
to disturb the image enough
that the eye believes it.
-from Bright Stain, Red Hen Press 2019, selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Spring Guest Editor, Luke Johnson
BIO: FRANCESCA BELL was born in Spokane, Washington into a family with deep, hardscrabble roots in the Northwest. Her maternal great-grandfather, the son of a prostitute and her client, was raised in a brothel. He raised his own six children, including Bell’s grandmother, on a 160-acre homestead in Plummer, Idaho. On her father’s side, the Norwegian Wikum family, when traced 700 years back, was already renowned for its spectacularly heavy drinking. The hard living continued in America where the clan was referred to around Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho as “the fighting Wikums.”Bell was raised in Washington and Idaho and settled as an adult in California. She did not complete middle school, high school, or college and holds no degrees. Bell’s poems appear in many magazines including ELLE, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and Tar River Poetry. Her translations, from Arabic and German, appear in Arc, B O D Y, Circumference | Poetry in Translation, Mid-American Review, and The Massachusetts Review. She is the co-translator of Palestinian poet Shatha Abu Hnaish's collection, A Love That Hovers Like a Bedeviling Mosquito (Dar Fadaat, 2017), and the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019).
