Francesca Bell – Leavening Agents

Leavening Agents                       for Ana Sometimes, my parents left me at the Methodist Sunday school and then went out to breakfast. It was the only religious training I ever had, but when the teacher asked, in a lesson about the power of Jesus, if anyone knew what yeast was, only I among the children could follow […]

Francesca Bell’s What Small Sound, Reviewed by Vivian Wagner

What Small Sound Francesca Bell Red Hen Press Reviewer: Vivian Wagner What Small Sound, a new poetry collection by Francesca Bell, is an exploration of life, death, and love, and of the myriad ways these essential elements of human existence intersect and define each other. The poems in this collection don’t offer any easy answers […]

Francesca Bell – After

After Once the body was wrenched whole from my body I deflated sank back into being ordinary a vessel returned purposeless to its shelf I hadn’t known until first the father and then the son swelled to fill my emptiness that I was a space a lack that walked through the world or danced or […]

Francesca Bell – Lightning Coming Closer All the Time

Lightning Coming Closer All the Time I can’t tell from here if the Lord is a sniper or a drunk guy with a shotgun. Whether He’s poised with His scalpel and scrubs or just reaching into His pickup for a hacksaw. I see my neighbor, raising a girl my daughter’s age, check into the hospital […]

Francesca Bell – Two Poems

Lessons My daughter dreads middle school science             because all they study is cataclysm,                         end-stopped species after end-stopped species,                                     earth’s slow dwindling.                         There is no longer a world to study             that teems with life, not a globe ecstatic in its wild spinning. Day after day,             they regard the crumbling edge,                         broken asphalt where a road runs […]