Francesca Bell: Taking Stock
There will be gunfire and its attendant regret. Police in their riot gear. Riots. There will be strawberries and hand grenades and the feeling in my belly when your touch explodes me. There will be hope and this life: its burial ground. A God who cleans His ass with us but sends dawn like a greeting card each morning. There will be doorknobs and ropes looped around them. Necks and people who ask for it to be over. Hunger and cancer and boots on the ground. Women split by babies forced into their wombs like bayonets into the bellies of soldiers. Viruses will go on detonating inside us while the morning glory overtakes the verbascum and opens its purple throats to the day.
Francesca Bell is the author of the collection Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019). She lives in Novato, California.
Copyright 2020 Francesca Bell
Thank you for this, Francesca, and for the light and spirit you bring to us all.
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Too true. And powerfully uttered. Thank you, Francesca. Thank you, Mike.
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Thanks, Andrea!
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There will be hope and this life its burial ground
This one hit me in the stomach, but that’s its power. Thank you.
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Fantastic! “Hunger and cancer / and boots / on the ground.”
Reminds me of Gilbert’s, “Brief for the Defense”.
I want to read more of Francesca’s work.
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Thanks, Jose. You should read more of Francesca Bell’s work. Her poems are beautiful
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