Francesca Bell: “As Stephen Dunn says, and as I tell my mother, the fact that something actually happened would be the very worst reason to write a poem about it.” (web)
Francesca Bell: “I write poetry in order to record the world’s strange symphony of abundance and loss, so I can play it back and try to make sense of it.” (web)
Francesca Bell: “The day I read about the running shoe that washed up on a Richmond beach still holding its foot, I really was having my toilets replaced, and my beagle really did escape out the propped-open front door, and she really was waiting for me, after my fruitless search for her, carrying someone else’s leg bones in her mouth. All of it got me thinking about how difficult it is to ever be completely finished with or free of anything. We humans cling to pretty much everything, it’s true, but this world is sticky in its own way and seems also to not want to let us go.” (web)
Max Sessner was born in 1959 in Fürth, Germany. He has long lived with his wife in Augsburg and has held a wide variety of jobs, working as a bookseller for the Augsburg public library, and currently for the department of public health. Sessner is the author of eight books of poetry including, most recently, Das Wasser von Gestern (The Water of Yesterday). | Francesca Bell: “I first came upon the poems of Max Sessner in the pages of the Austrian literary journal manuskripte. I was reading German-language journals with an eye toward finding a poet in whose work I could immerse myself, and those first eleven Sessner poems caught my attention and held it fast. I wrote immediately to ask permission to translate them. In Max Sessner’s work, I found a poetry that is simultaneously melancholy and funny, deeply tender and yet eviscerating. His voice is entirely, profoundly his own, and his poems, deceptively accessible, contain complex, often uncanny, ideas and sentiments. I remain fascinated and humbled by how deftly he uses surrealism, not to obscure reality, but to illuminate it.” (web)
Francesca Bell: “When I read this article about four things a person might first become forgetful about as they begin to develop Alzheimer’s, I thought I ought to keep a little eye on myself. But I promptly forgot the four things I should be watching for. And the name of the article. And where I had read it. Which ended up inspiring a bumpy trip down memory lane and this poem.” (web)
Francesca Bell: “I first noticed that I had begun to lose my hearing when I was 24. I was especially attuned to hearing loss, having spent nearly my whole life watching my mother lose hers. My loss, thankfully, has not been as precipitous as my mother’s. She was in her 20s when she got her first hearing aids and is functionally deaf by now. I was able—with difficulty and with great forbearance on the part of my family—to make it to 50 before finally addressing my growing disability. I never take for granted the magic and the privilege of having hearing aids, the new ease they lend to my life, but I absolutely dread the hearing tests that are now part of my routine. I’ve seldom felt so acute an isolation as when I sit in the little booth trying to hear what I no longer can.” (web)
“Heart in a Box” by Francesca BellPosted by Rattle
Francesca Bell
HEART IN A BOX
It was captured, like so much else, on video.
The helicopter’s slow approach.
How it seemed to sidle in the air, toward the hospital roof, where it meant to land.
How the machine faltered and, faltering, began to spin, shedding debris—the way a person in moments of loss will sometimes shed hubris—before it surrendered, finally, to gravity and dropped to its side.
It rested there, as if disoriented, until first responders helped the pilot and passengers out, nearly unscathed.
Then, with the Jaws of Life, the donor heart, trapped in the wreckage, was pried free, still beating in its box.
As it used to beat beneath a chest’s fertile field before doctors made a furrow in the flesh and split an archway of bone to harvest it.
As a woman’s belly is sometimes sliced open and a whole new person hauled out.
As someone’s love can pull you from your life’s dark cavity into the light.
Onscreen, you can watch the man in scrubs scoop the box into his arms and dash across the helipad.
Maybe it’s his patient whose heart decays inside.
Maybe he’s thinking of his ex-lover’s pulse, how it used to quicken beneath his touch.
Maybe he trembles, remembering, as the severed heart dances against his chest.
You can watch him cradle it before he trips, see his grip tighten just before he begins to fall.
See the heart skitter away.
Imagine the man’s own heart as it plummeted.
How it clenched its battered fist inside him and then went on.
Francesca Bell: “In the midst of all of the big political news and the devastating pandemic news, a smaller story captured my attention this week, the story of a helicopter bearing a donor heart that crashed atop the hospital where a patient awaited a transplant. It was amazing that none of the three people in the helicopter sustained serious injuries, but how incredible that the donor heart was found intact and rescued from the wreckage. That would have been story enough, but once the heart, safe in its travel box, was handed off to a member of the hospital staff, it was dropped. In his rush, the man carrying the heart across the helipad tripped over a metal plate, and the heart flew from his grasp as he fell. The organ survived all of this and was transplanted successfully that day. Of additional interest to me is the relatively new technology used to transport harvested hearts. They are kept beating, circulating blood, at just the right temperature in what is called a ‘heart in a box’ device.” (web)
