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      July 18, 2017Have You ForgottenHeather Bell

      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.

      from Kill the Dogs

      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.”

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