Francesca Bell

July 19, 2017

“Containment” by Francesca BellPosted by

Francesca Bell

CONTAINMENT

When the man sat down next to me at Starbucks, need coming off of him like a pheromone, I was quiet, having read, more than once, God save me from the well-meaning white woman, for he was a person of color—I wasn’t sure which color, but not a fucking white person like me—and maybe I was profiling him, maybe I was an asshole and had already offended the black woman who said I could share the table but packed up her things when I sat down, leaving me to chew my dry, multigrain bagel thoroughly like the stereotype it was and read an article about wildfires in Canada and how people watched their homes burn, at a comfortable distance, on cameras linked to their phones, until the man asked quietly, from his place to my side, if I could buy him a cup of coffee, his face open the way a wound is open, soft face about the age of my soft-faced son, and it was Mother’s Day, and I couldn’t escape the bounds of my whiteness, but I worried he was hungry, my son is always hungry, so I said I’d like to buy him something to eat, too, and asked was he okay, and he said he was, but life is strange right now, and I said, yes, isn’t that the truth, and I had an appointment to get to and handed him twenty dollars from the stack in my purse and heard him order coffee and his bagel with cream cheese, and the black woman came back and sat down just as I walked out, my tears overflowing like clichés.

—from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness

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Francesca Bell: “I’ve written quite a bit about different mental illnesses, my own and others, and I try to even over-share about it. I had this experience, when my relative was very sick with his bipolar disorder and OCD, I shared about it with a woman that I knew, and she came back to me years later and thanked me. Her daughter had developed OCD, and if it hadn’t been for me, she wouldn’t have known what it was, and she wouldn’t have known what to do. So that’s another thing that we really lose when we don’t talk about it. You can save other people a lot of time and suffering, just sharing your own experience.” (website)

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June 10, 2016

“When I Think About Cats” by Francesca BellPosted by

Francesca Bell

WHEN I THINK ABOUT CATS

I think about that Spokane basement,
how the cats went nuts
shitting all over the concrete floor,
and I was sent down to clean it.
Some of it came right up, tidy handfuls
of shit, but some was diarrhea
dried hard, so I had to slop puddles
of hot water and bleach
on those spots and wait,
nostrils stinging, for the mess
to soften. That was the year
I turned 12, when my family’s boozy
heritage arrived in burning-tongued
waves on our shores.
So when I see in The Atlantic,
these years later, that T. gondii,
cat shit parasite, can lodge
in a rat’s brain or a person’s
and make them crazy,
I flash back to bleach, liquor, vomit,
all the stains that refuse
to budge. I know metaphor lurks
here: how the parasite can live
in rats but has to get back
into the belly of a cat
to reproduce, how it highjacks
the brain’s circuits until
rats are aroused by cat urine
and find themselves milling around
in the open like women
who walk bad neighborhoods
after dark, and those male rats
lucky enough to get lucky,
infect the rat mamas,
and 60% of their pups are born
yearning for what will kill them.
And still I find myself wanting bleary men
better passed with my head down,
and I don’t want to know
who I am in this metaphor—
cat, rat, parasite—and who
the men may be, lined up like bottles
in a liquor store, mesmerizing—
their breathalyzer-blowing kisses,
their bodies straining to enter my body,
their fluids to make it past
the gates at my very center,
and my DNA waiting
with its thirst like a hole
and the edge of that hole a cliff
I look down from always,
where my wildness bubbles up
like the fizz of fermentation
or water that’s too hot
to hold still.

—from Rattle #51, Spring 2016
Tribute to Feminist Poets

[download audio]

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Francesca Bell: “I wrote ‘When I Think About Cats’ after reading Kathleen McAuliffe’s article ‘How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy’ in The Atlantic. We had cats when I was growing up, and it was my job to clean their litter box—a task I failed constantly to complete—so the cats took to using our entire laundry room floor as their litter box, which expanded the scope of my chore considerably. McAuliffe’s article about the possible long-range effects of infection by the cat-borne parasite T. gondii got me to thinking about those long afternoons cleaning the laundry room and about the way so many of us, like T. gondii-infected rats, end up most attracted to what can cause us the most harm.” (website)

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December 8, 2013

“Where We Are Most Tender” by Francesca BellPosted by

Francesca Bell

WHERE WE ARE MOST TENDER

Mostly love is about grunt work,
heaving unwieldy pieces of furniture
up a trackless mountain,
the heat and humidity punishing,
mosquitoes ravenous. They bite
where we are most tender
and can’t slap with our full hands.

We love with our restraint, lying
silent through bitter nights,
doing the left-foot right-foot trudge
of resentment:
our hearts like Indian guides
leading stupid white settlers
into wilderness.

They don’t even turn
to check if we’re there—
they know we’ll follow.

—from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

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Francesca Bell: “I wrote ‘Where We Are Most Tender’ after a spectacular disagreement with my husband. We were several years and many long nights into our marriage before I learned to take love’s measure, not in sweetness shared, but in savagery withstood and moved beyond.” (web)

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June 6, 2010

“With a Little Education” by Francesca BellPosted by

Francesca Bell

WITH A LITTLE EDUCATION

This is what became of that homely high school boy
with the fine hands and big brain. He ended up sliding
his fingers all day into the vaginas of other men’s wives.
Expensive women who book six months in advance
to take off their clothes for him. He keeps them
waiting under a harsh light and thin sheet
before delivering their silver-spoon babies and bad news,
before roving his skilled hands over all that cheerful flesh
that used to be firmly out of his reach. They send him
flowers now and page him after hours, tell him
when their sex lives are painful or dry up entirely.
He coaches them to remind their deal-making,
deposition-taking husbands of the grave
importance of foreplay. He touches their sleeves
as they leave with what could only be mistaken
for tenderness, and smiles, knowing they wonder
what he does with his hands at night. How different
his landscape looks now: his rolling stool like a throne,
the world he has mastered spread glorious before him.
If only he had known, back when he was pimpled
and pained, that even the hearts of the beautiful burn
in the third trimester, and that age bursts
in without mercy on everyone, even those girls
as effervescent and confusing as champagne.
If only he could have imagined how easy
it would be, with a little education,
to wake each morning to a string of women
naked in his office and ready just for him.

[download audio]

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

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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.” (website)

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